Michelle Monaghan vs. Katie Holmes
Battle of the Tom Cruise Love Interests

As we write this, Tom Cruise is starring in an international spectacle that finds him battling powerful forces to assert and re-assert his love for a willowy brunette. Villains keep trying to pry Cruise and his lady apart, but that doesn't dull his devotion to her. Nay, the opposition to their pairing seems almost to fuel him to ever greater and showier acts of heroism in support of their relationshp. She doesn't get much of a chance to say anything, but when she does speak, it's to assert and re-assert her love for him. A lot of money has been thrown at this venture, which hasn't quite performed up to expectations.

The Question: Are we talking about Cruise's fictional life, in Mission: Impossible III, in which he stars opposite Michelle Monaghan? Or are we talking about his non-fictional life, in which he stars opposite Katie Holmes?

The Answer: Does it even matter anymore?

Even as early as last summer, Cruise was starting to blur the line between his acting onscreen and his acting(-out) as a public person. Each moment of his courtship with Holmes seemed as meticulously staged and choreographed as a press event for either Batman Begins or War Of The Worlds, the movies they were incidentally plugging while mostly promoting their own couplehood. They couldn't just show up somewhere; they had to roar up on his big old hog, her clutching him around the waist (blurring another line -- between PDA and personal safety). He couldn't just propose; he had to fly her to Paris and pop the question there. We already knew he did his own stunts in the movies; it seemed very important to him that we also see him doing his own stunts in real life, too.

Then, sometime after he'd taken up with Holmes, Cruise started making Mission: Impossible III. We were treated to paparazzi shots of him on the set (acting) canoodling with the ever-present Holmes (living). But it wasn't clear until the movie actually came out last week exactly how much Cruise had blurred the line between his real life and the risk-taking, authority-flouting, woman-loving character he was playing. Because Michelle Monaghan? Who plays Julie, Ethan Hunt's fiancée in Mission: Impossible III? Bears a surprising resemblance to Katie Holmes. A shocking resemblance, even. Actually, scratch that: it's a creepily close resemblance.

Okay -- if you just put their headshots side by side, the resemblance between Monaghan and Holmes probably wouldn't freak you out. But Julie and Holmes could be twins. Monaghan, as Julie, has long, thick, center-parted hair with shorter layers around her face and neck. She dresses in skinny jeans and dainty little virginal camisoles; one scene she shares with Cruise has her in a turtleneck and vintage-y shrunken blazer that we could swear we've seen Holmes in at some point. There's about the same age difference between her and Cruise as there is between Holmes and Cruise (Monaghan about two and a half years older than Holmes). But mostly, the resemblance is based on the fact that after a full year of having Cruise and Holmes's love affair splashed across every news-delivery system one might come across, when you see Tom Cruise alongside an attractive brunette, your brain wants to put Holmes's face on her skull. Your eye is presented with this; your brain supplies this. What we are trying to say is this: Cruise is so determined to art-direct his own life for public consumption that he even went so far as to cast, as his fake fiancée, a woman guaranteed to remind us of his real one. That is a serious commitment to a brand.

Even before she started looking like Katie Holmes in this latest absurdly gigantic blockbuster, Monaghan was having a good year: folks liked Mr. And Mrs. Smith, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and North Country, in some part due to her performances; her next film -- Gone, Baby, Gone -- finds her in the fine company of Ed Harris and Casey "The Better One" Affleck. Holmes, on the other hand -- as both the future bride of the world's most famous movie star and the owner of the womb whence his progeny sprang -- never has to work again. And maybe never will.

Advantage: Monaghan -- the one who gets to pretend to kiss Tom Cruise and then sleep in her own bed at night.