Ten years ago, the very first post was shared here on Life Between Frames. It was titled "Not a memo. A mission statement", and laid out the idea behind this blog. In a time when the online film community seemed to be overrun with cynicism and negativity, I wanted to start a blog that would be all about celebrating movies and sharing positive recommendations. In the ten years since that post, I've tried my best to stick to that idea. I haven't loved every movie I've talked about here, in fact I have written about some movies I didn't like at all, but even then I keep it respectful. All these years later, I still don't have a negative or cynical view on cinema.
"Not a memo. A mission statement" is a line from writer/director Cameron Crowe's 1996 film Jerry Maguire, and since a line from that movie got the blog started, it's kind of surprising that I have never gotten around to writing about Jerry Maguire at any point in the last ten years. Now's the time to make up for that.
I was 13 years old when Jerry Maguire reached theatres in December of 1996, and you might not expect that a 13 year old who never had any interest in sports (aside from one season of playing soccer in grade school) would have any interest in a drama about a sports agent starting his own company and romancing an accountant / single mother, but I was already obsessed with the movie industry and there was a lot of hype and Oscar buzz around this movie when it was coming out, so I was guaranteed to watch it. Part of the hype was built up by Rosie O'Donnell. She had just started hosting a talk show that year and my sister-in-law watched it all the time, so I remember seeing Rosie going on and on about her crush on star Tom Cruise a lot in the build-up to this film's release. Then Cruise was a guest on the show, and it was a big deal.
At this point, I'm what you could call a Tom Cruise super-fan. He's one of my favorite actors, I see every movie he makes and add it to my collection. Although I had grown up seeing him in various movies, I wasn't a super-fan yet in '96. It was Jerry Maguire that really made me start to appreciate Cruise's screen presence. He is incredible in this movie; his performance as the title character is one of the best performances of his career, and he rightfully received an Oscar nomination for it.
When we first meet Jerry, he seems to be living his life as a smarmy jackass. He's an agent at Sports Management International and has 72 clients who rake in millions and millions of dollars playing sports. He'll defend scumbag clients, sit by quietly while clients refuse to sign autographs for kids due to contractual technicalities, and show no concern for a hockey player who has just suffered his fourth concussion. But then he has a crisis of conscience. A breakthrough. Breakdown? Breakthrough. Over the course of one night, he pours his heart out into a twenty-five page mission statement he titles The Things We Think and Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business. In this tome, he suggests that the agents of Sports Management International should take on less clients (and yes, accept that they'll be making less money that way) so they can build true personal relationships with the people they work for. So they can care about these people, and protect them in health and injury. He distributes copies of his mission statement to everyone who works at the agency... and doesn't realize it's not going to go over well until after all of the copies have been delivered. Jerry has soon been fired for disrupting the company with this touchy-feely nonsense.
Jerry doesn't just lose his job. He also loses his awful fiancee Avery (Kelly Preston), and almost all of his clients. He walks out of Sports Management International promising that he's going to start his own agency, taking with him nothing but some fish he steals from the company fish tank and accountant Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zellweger), who was inspired by the mission statement and had a pleasant encounter with Jerry at an airport.
Jerry is only able to hold on to one client for sure, and this guy is a handful. That's Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a loquacious football player with an attitude problem and a desire to get as much money out of his career as he can before he ages out in about five years. Jerry also has a fervent hope that he'll be able to work with rising football star Frank Cushman (Jerry O'Connell), who passes all of the business talk over to his dad (Beau Bridges), but we see how things are going for Jerry so it's not exactly a surprise when that working relationship crumbles.
There are only a few shreds of hope to keep Jerry from hitting rock bottom, but Crowe and Cruise play his stress, frustration, and desperation in such a way that it's frequently hilarious. Jerry pleading with Rod to "help me help you"; offering to give away his jacket, he doesn't need it because he's "cloaked in failure"; telling someone to "jump right into my nightmare, the water is warm". It's funny and relatable at the same time.
Another great source of humor is Gooding's Oscar-winning performance as Rod. The guy is a pain, but he has a good heart, and a great relationship with his family, including his wife Marcee (Regina King). Dorothy isn't the most amusing character, but she is surrounded by amusing people; her sister Laurel (Bonnie Hunt), her au pair Chad (Todd Louiso), and her young son Ray (Jonathan Lipnicki), who develops a fantastic, heartwarming rapport with Jerry.
Jerry's business struggles are a major part of the film, but it's not the only thing going on here. As popular lines like "You complete me" and "You had me at hello" indicate, this is also a love story, as Jerry and Dorothy embark on a beyond-professional relationship about halfway through. Dorothy is a single mother to Ray because she's a widow, but through dialogue we learn that her late husband was not good to her, which is an unusual story element for a romantic comedy like this to include. It's not often you hear about a dead ex who wasn't a nice person in this sort of movie.
This is not a straightforward "and they lived happily ever after" rom com, though. Achieving that ending is not an easy thing for Jerry. That's part of how the movie ends up being over 138 minutes long; things are complicated. We're shown warning signs early on that Jerry is not good with romance, we see exes talking about him seeking out relationships simply because he's afraid of being alone, and about him being great at friendship but bad at intimacy. His issues do come into play during his relationship with Dorothy, and nearly ruin that relationship.
Jerry Maguire is a great drama, a great comedy, and tells a fascinating story about a character I never would have expected to be interested in at all, a sports agent. Seemingly against the odds, this movie captivated me when I was 13 years old, and I spent a good chunk of the next year with Jerry Maguire on my mind a lot. I saw the movie in the theatre with my brother and sister-in-law, and enjoyed it so much that I bought it on VHS as soon as it was available - and I happened to be on a road trip with my truck driver father at that time, so my VHS copy of Jerry Maguire was purchased at a truck stop. My father and I then watched the movie together on the TV he had in the cab of his truck... and he wasn't a big fan of it, because my parents were starting the divorce process at that time, and apparently Jerry's relationship issues struck too close to home for him.
My parents were still on good enough terms that my mom met us at my paternal grandmother's house at the end of that road trip, and all four of us - me, my parents, and grandma - watched that VHS copy of Jerry Maguire together. Grandma saw film reviews in my future when I asked her what she thought of the movie and gave it my own star rating. I can't remember what I said at the time, maybe 4 or 4 and a half stars out of 5.
Cameron Crowe is known for crafting good soundtracks for his films, and one of the songs on the Jerry Maguire soundtrack is Bruce Springsteen's "Secret Garden". There was a special radio edit of "Secret Garden" that was released in the wake of the film's release that spliced dialogue from the movie into the song. I remember sitting in a car for several minutes, just waiting for that version of "Secret Garden" to come on the radio.
Rewatching Jerry Maguire twenty-four years later, I still have a lot of love for this movie. The performances are terrific, there's a ton of memorable and quotable dialogue, and it has a lot of heart. And yeah, now I kind of know how my father felt. I see some of Jerry's flaws in myself as well. But that doesn't hinder my enjoyment of the movie. It makes me appreciate it even more, because Crowe packed so much true human emotion and complexity into it.
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