Tom Cruise poses for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, on May 14.Joel C Ryan/The Associated Press
Like Ethan Hunt, the “living manifestation of destiny” super-spy who is at the heart of the Mission: Impossible franchise, the Cannes Film Festival possesses something of a god complex.
From its high-couture red-carpet premieres, including the latest M:I entry, to its fiery press conferences that can so frequently veer into political polemics, Cannes evokes the air of almighty authority – its dominion touches everything, from cinema to sexual politics to socio-economics and beyond.
At least that’s how it felt during the first two days of the 78th annual festival, where the natural beauty of the French Riviera backdropped the most dizzying and anxious kind of cultural conversations.
If you wanted to talk about the cultural death of America, you had Robert De Niro – in town to accept a lifetime achievement award – denouncing U.S. President Donald Trump as a “philistine” unprompted.
If you wanted to wade into the film industry’s ostensibly post-#MeToo era, you had Cannes jury president Juliette Binoche denouncing her one-time co-star Gerard Depardieu, who just hours before the festival opened was convicted of sexual assault.
And if you wanted to talk about tariffs, well, you could go just about anywhere, from the sweaty trade floor of the Marché du Film to the nearby pristine hotel terraces where a bottle of Orangina will run you €10, but at least your drink will be guarded over by a team of falconers (who are actually on hand to ward off pigeons).
Of course, if you simply want to watch movies, there were those, too, from the haunting highs of German filmmaker Misha Schilinski’s century-spanning coming-of-age drama Sound of Falling, which delivered a tremendous jolt to the fest’s official competition program right off the bat, to the more middle-down-the-road French musical Partir un Jour.
The gospel of Cannes, hey, it contains multitudes.
But lording over all the Cannes madness wasn’t such a consecrated figure as the festival’s long-time chief Thierry Frémaux but rather Hollywood’s very last action hero, Tom Cruise. While the surely-impossible-to-insure daredevil didn’t parachute onto the Croisette as some members of the press speculated, he did wrap the festival up in his perfectly manicured hands as he turned up for the world premiere of his eighth, and allegedly last, Ethan Hunt adventure, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
From dawn till dusk Wednesday, the entire populace of Cannes could not escape Cruise’s shadow. There he was with his long-time collaborator, director Christopher McQuarrie – 11 films and counting – posing for early a.m. photos on the Croisette: Cruise in a deep maroon ensemble that hugged his absurdly sculpted 62-year-old chest, McQuarrie in a head-to-toe cream-coloured suit that screamed untouchable talent.
A few hours later, Cruise was snugly clad in black tie and signing every single autograph-seeker presented to him on the red carpet outside the magisterial Grand Théâtre Lumière, a crowd-pleasing feat that delayed the start of the premiere (which, just to hammer home the spectacle, opened with a 40-member orchestra playing the M:I theme.)
Even when McQuarrie was submitting himself to a 90-minute “master class” on-stage discussion with French journalist Didier Allouch earlier in the afternoon – a time when the director could talk about something other than Cruise, including his groundbreaking script for The Usual Suspects and his subsequent desire to escape Hollywood – Cruise made a “surprise” appearance just 20 minutes in, not so much hijacking the conversation as pumping it up to Cruise-ian levels of spectacle.
“Tom Cruise competes with nobody but himself,” McQuarrie said to the crowd, entirely sincere and wry at the same time.
You couldn’t blame the actor’s exhaustive efforts. The Final Reckoning, which by some estimates is one of the most expensive movies ever made, is a true do-or-die test for not only Cruise’s star power, but for the theatrical-first Hollywood model that the man has been carrying on his back ever since the pandemic tore through the industry.
It is not only that the new M:I film has to be a big fat global hit for Paramount Pictures to recoup its investment – it has to prove that real-deal movie stars can still entice audiences to leave their couches. Cruise’s legacy is one thing, but the man is also trying to ensure that there is an entire future of Tom Cruises – be it Glen Powell or Michael B. Jordan – to come.
All of which made watching The Final Reckoning such a disorienting and overwhelming affair.
A 169-minute epic that is as jaw-dropping as it is narratively incomprehensible – you will lose track of how many doomsday device MacGuffins that Ethan and his team must collect and disassemble – McQuarrie’s film also acts as a fierce argument that Cruise is, in fact, a god among men. In more ways than one, the film posits, the only thing standing between humanity and the end of the world as we know it is Tom Cruise.
And honestly, by the time that the 3,000-plus moviegoers who filled the Grand Théâtre Lumière greeted Cruise with a lengthy post-screening standing ovation – echoed on the other side of town by an overflow satellite screening in Cannes’ only IMAX theatre, the Cineum – it felt like the faithful had been rewarded. There but for the grace of Tom, goes Cannes.
Cannes Buzz List
Tom Cruise aside, here are five titles that have critics talking heading into Cannes’ opening weekend:
• Ari Aster’s surreal comedy Eddington, which follows the pandemic-era fallout of a small-town Texas election.
• Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut The Chronology of Water, a dark sexual drama.
• Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love, a relationship drama starring Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence.
• Wes Anderson’s new comedy The Phoenician Scheme, starring Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera and Tom Hanks.
• Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, dramatizing the filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.
