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WARNING: Contains mild Identity spoilers!
The foremost thought in my mind last weekend as I watched Identity (apart from "Man, this movie is some horseshit) was, "Where did it all go wrong for John Cusack?"
Some will say that nothing has gone wrong for John Cusack -- that, on the contrary, things are going pretty well for him. He's in a movie that opened at #1. He recently got to star in a highly controversial little art-house movie, to give him a bit of cred outside the multiplex. He's reportedly dating beloved romcom mainstay Meg Ryan. What's wrong with any of that?
Glad you asked. His movie held on to the #1 box office slot for a matter of hours, only to be ripped the hell out of it the following week by X2. His highly controversial little art-house movie was shunned even by art-house audiences -- partly because the plot revolved around a young Adolf Hitler, and partly because Leelee Sobieski was in it. And the right time to date Meg Ryan (if there ever is a right time) is before Paramount yanked her crappy boxing movie off its schedule. All of this reflects poorly on young John Cusack.
And no one would care about John Cusack's current status as an average Hollywood asshole if he hadn't spent so many years as every Gen-X girl's secret boyfriend. So sweet and doomed in Stand By Me! So sweet and heartbroken in Better Off Dead! And don't even get us started on Say Anything.... As we grew up and our womanly needs evolved, Cusack was there to meet them -- all nerdy and artistic (and in period costume) in Bullets Over Broadway; all angry and political in Bob Roberts; all sensitive yet ass-kicking in Grosse Pointe Blank.
But then, suddenly he started showing up in the kinds of movies we didn't want to see. Overlong, overcooked Southern Gothic dreck (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil). Generic Jerry Bruckheimer action movie #182 (Con Air -- and in huaraches, to make matters worse). Overlong, lyrical WWII epics (The Thin Red Line). Painful alleged romcoms most notable for showcasing Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton's dysfunctional marriage before the fact (Pushing Tin). We got a brief respite with Being John Malkovich -- an actual good movie, even if Cusack wasn't exactly styled to appeal to our latent crush on him. (Ugh...that wig. And the gay-ass collarless shirts. Moving on.) But then it was back to the same old crapola that had characterized his career since the mid-'90s -- smug and overrated romcom with art-house pretensions (High Fidelity). Regular old utterly forgettable and baaaaaad romcom (America's Sweethearts). The romcom that somehow got saddled with the task of Healing Our National Wounds after the September 11th terrorist attacks (Serendipity). And then, Identity. That makes it a good three and a half years since John Cusack made a movie that wasn't aggressively bad, irretrievably moronic, or both.
In some respects, it's not like Cusack's decline is something we haven't seen before, from hundreds of other actors -- the effect of choosing to make movies that earn them fat salaries rather than movies that are not ass. Which is fine, if you mix it up; if you don't, you end up...well, Nicolas Cage. But at this point, we even respect Nicolas Cage more (only a tiny bit more, but still -- more) than John Cusack, if only because Cage has enthusiastically embraced his new career as a hack. He's done, like, ten Jerry Bruckheimer movies, and he's chewed his way through the scenery on all of them with all the coked-up vigor of a young Kelsey Grammer. But when John Cusack makes a crappy big-budget movie, he makes it clear that, fat salary or no, he knows what he's doing is Beneath Him.
For instance: he'll show up in Con Air -- sharing screen time with a bunch of actors much more talented than he (John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames), all slumming just like himself -- and yet he'll play the guy in huaraches, whose wussiness compared to all the other characters is presented in the guise of cool reason. In Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, he's thrust in the middle of this sweaty world of murderous Kevin Spaceys and gigantic drag queens -- but he's the Yankee reporter who observes and judges the proceedings as a detached and superior outsider. In America's Sweethearts, he takes on one of the schmuckiest parts in contemporary cinema -- playing the male "lead" opposite Julia Roberts in a romantic comedy -- and yet play a character who's given up acting in romantic comedies in favour of pursuing some shady, quasi-Eastern religion. In Identity, even after he runs over a woman on the highway and causes her near-fatal injuries -- a car accident that's completely his fault -- Cusack's character is still cast as the hero just because he tries to save his victim from the injuries he caused her, and because, as a former police officer, he's the most upstanding citizen among all the freaks and misfits with whom he's stranded in a creepy hotel. Cusack tries to make us see that he may be in these movies, but he's not of them. If he isn't careful, he's going to turn into Edward Norton. (Can it be a coincidence that both of them have played the young Nelson Rockefeller as he related to Frida Kahlo?)
Because we used to be fans, we'd like to say that John Cusack is at a crossroads in his career, where he must choose whether to continue pouting his way through common Hollywood offal, or go back to putting a little effort into appearing in movies that are equal to his own estimation of his talents. But we can't say that. Because he was at that crossroads circa Being John Malkovich, and followed it up with various kinds of trash. And as far as his fame is concerned, it's a very short-sighted strategy: even as he lines his bank accounts, he loses the affection of all the Gen-X girls who crushed on him back in his Lloyd Dobler days. Any stooge can headline a Jerry Bruckheimer movie or Sixth Sense manqué suspense "thriller," but a devoted cult fan base requires careful nurturing and attention. John Cusack has thrown over his most loving fans in order to make out with Julia Roberts and embody John Grisham characters. Lloyd Dobler has left the building.
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