hackerchick

Like there are several little comments made in the beginning of the film that paint a picture of her life prior to meeting Ethan as a woman entering her 30s, has little dating experience, and whose friends and family are all married with children except for her. Some cut lines from the MI3 script are 1) her sister saying she’s surprised Julia finally amounted to something and 2) Julia telling a coworker that she works too much and doesn’t take any time off. Those comments + Julia saying “you make it sound like I’ve never dated” to her friends + her sister also demanding she have kids with Ethan at their engagement party (which you can see Julia shakes her head no at lol) all hint at this intense fixation on Julia being an incomplete person and a failure because she hasn’t settled down like everyone else in her life has.

She obviously develops a complex about this because she’s been condemned to spinsterdom at the ripe old age of 28. So she goes to New Zealand by herself to repeatedly jump out of a helicopter for fun. While doing this, she meets a guy 12 years her senior who looks like a scumbag and is evasive about where he’s from or what he does for work. She’s immediately like oh hell yeah this dude is a walking red flag. I’m gonna have very mid drunk sex with him. cue 5.5/10 drunk sex. Then she posts this photo to myspace and all her friends are like ohhhh she’s definitely lost it for sure. We all knew this was coming. Cue more spite-fuelled sex with scumbag. This continues happening as Julia plunges further into the I Actually Have A Better And More Interesting Life Than All Of You crisis spiral.

Cruise enters the scene and stalks up to his father with exaggerated cheer. He reverts into his offensive position — the hands-on-hips macho stage pose — but Cruise lets his nerves slip: he’s breathing too heavy, baring his teeth, and tapping his foot loudly just out of frame. Then the hurt rolls in like a fog. Cruise puts his superhuman body control to work. His lips purse; he shakes imperceptibly and clasps his hands together so hard that the knuckles turn white. Just as he vows, “I am not going to cry,” Cruise tilts his head to the ceiling, perfectly placed so the light catches a tear seconds before it spills across his face. As he collapses into sobs, a vein pops in his forehead, his face turns painfully red, and by the time he hollers, “Don’t go away, you fucking asshole!” Cruise is heaving like a hurt animal. The whole arc happens in just under two minutes, and it’s arguably the best two minutes of acting in Cruise’s career.

“The whole time with the character, I was skating on the edge,” acknowledged Cruise. The personal parallels between him and Mackey were closer than he cared to admit. In a strikingly candid 1992 interview with GQ, Cruise described his final moments with his father and presaged the same struggles Mackey would face seven years later. “When people can’t forgive someone, my question always is, ‘What have you done in your life that you can’t forgive this other person?’” asked Cruise. “The things you’ve got to take responsibility for in your life, it makes forgiveness quite easy. And it also brought me a lot of understanding about him and the pain he was in.”

But by the time Magnolia earned him his third Academy Award nomination, Cruise had clammed up about his father. Back on the awards circuit, and this time all but certain that the Oscar was his, he wanted to build protective distance between himself and the script. And why risk voters thinking he wasn’t really “acting”?

Again, Cruise lost. He’d ripped his life open for a tightly crafted, stunningly raw performance. And it still wasn’t enough. Cruise was done chasing Oscars — now it was time to have fun.