If I had to pick a moment from a film that’s resonated with me lately, I would choose one that’s been vastly ignored. It’s from Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, and it’s buried within the emotional climactic scene where Tom Cruise barges in on the neo-feminist divorcee club to win back Renée Zellweger, delivering a long monologue ending with the phrase that permanently entered the zeitgeist, “You complete me”.
But that’s not the moment that I’m thinking of. It’s about three sentences earlier. Cameron Crowe knows how to write dialogue; he easily inherits the chair of conversation-mastery recently vacated by the late Eric Rohmer. Yet this monologue wanders and meanders, and finally Jerry loses his train of thought. He pauses, and in a wonderful non-sequitur, slowly says, “We live in a cynical world. A cynical … world …” (more…)
