TOBEY MAGUIRE

CINERAMA

GREAT PERFORMANCES DEPENDENT ON REALITY OF AN IMPERFECT AMERICA

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

N

o performance may be more perfect than the on screen portrayal of an imperfect hero. 

Tobey Maguire would eventually turn the human frailties of his screen character into fame and fortune as Spider-Man. 

But the authentic acting the young actor had already established in dramas spilled into the comic book dramatizations that relied on real life situations. The superpowers of a Marvel Comic icon were literally and figuratively just a computer generated image add-on.

Maguire has this great ability to project the pleasure of play during the difficult truths of the moment, so much so he can merely go along for the ride without interfering too much in the natural outcome of the narrative.

In Cider House Rules (1999), an orphanage springs up around the offices of an abortionist when the obstetrician occasionally found himself delivering babies instead of aborting them. The screen character Maguire has developed is definitely maturing in a scripted fashion after a screening of King Kong (1937) during the film, but the superpowers and the red costume are still three years away.

In Wonder Boys (2000) Maguire gets one year closer to the Marvel film release with the future superheroes huddling near a door frame as if foreshadowing the box office earthquakes from the inevitable casting of Ironman and Spider-Man. 

The Hollywood era of superheroes may have started in earnest with lead actor Michael Douglas staring down a bulldog in the hallway of the home belonging to his adulterous lover. Even Batman’s childhood girlfriend, played by Katie Holmes, practices that gosh awful beautiful know it all smile perhaps unknowingly knowing that many of the cast members are soon to be scripted into the Marvel Universe.

Douglas shows the underlings how to live on the edge, just a thin razor edge from completely falling apart as a sort of primer for when Maguire takes on the Peter Parker role.

Spider-Man 1 was a successful wrap during an uncertain time when fantasy and reality came crashing together following the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks on the World Trade Towers in New York City. The world came to realize that the real world villains could now materialize on a whim anywhere on the Planet, just like in the comic books.

The Spider-Man superpowers become just an added sideshow in and above and around a screen character flowing through the scenes with all the ups and downs of genuine humanity. 

People all over the globe lost faith in the invincibility of the Developed World while harboring that most dangerous of thoughts of using nuclear deterrents to make all the villains vanish from the homeland and stay away from now on.

Maguire’s interpretation of Spider-Man personifies this duality of humanity.

In Seabiscuit (2003), Maguire drops the superhero outfit between franchise films to take a starring role in the true story about an undersized racehorse and a beat up, turned out jockey during the Great Depression. 

Maguire is cast well with established Hollywood actor Jeff Bridges playing the benevolent patriarch, Charles Howard.

Director Gary Ross turns the world over during a desperate time with a poignant piece of Americana. Ross explores in the biopic the strength of relationships and the depths of human perseverance.

Maguire comes to personify that Great American story about conquering adversity. The actor shows how Red Pollard makes mistakes, no doubt, but the jockey is always somehow justified despite the uncontrolled overreactions that get him into trouble. This moral conundrum compels the character forward until he attains success on screen – but only after accumulating a few more bumps and bruises along the way.

Bridges shows how Howard was a gentle genius building a fortune in the transportation industry by initially repairing and selling bicycles, and then by happenstance, moving into repairing and selling automobiles before becoming captivated by the sports business of racehorses. Elizabeth Banks costars as Mrs. Marcela Howard.

Bridges also played automotive innovator Preston Tucker in Francis Ford Coppola’s American biopic, Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), costarring Joan Allen.

Maguire has really worked his acting art in a bid to maintain a cinematic presence without the superhero mask and Computer Generated Imaging magic for this important piece as a doer done-by, one last chance classic sports hero.

Then, in Spider-Man 2, Maguire shows how the superhero has difficulty with his movie magic for all the same reasons that ordinary people do. Peter Parker must confront a villain attempting to harness the explosive energy of the sun.

As an aside, Michael Bublé sings the Spider-Man theme song in Spider-Man 2.

In Spider-Man 3 (2007) the theme of ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ is explored to a fitting conclusion as Spider-Man must do battle with his evil doppelganger.

Maguire sticks to other worldly themes when he moves his talents away from the franchise typecasting to play characters in classic Americana.

In the biopic, Pawn Sacrifice (2014) Maguire plays chess grand master Bobby Fischer with all his nuances and eccentricities the process of taking on the world’s great chess players brings out in his personality.

Maguire changes up his screen character by adopting the distinct American dialect of Fischer and limiting the character’s ego with the pressures of geopolitics that prove too great for the mental genius, just as the horse jockey has problems with unrealistic, self-made expectations for success on the racetrack.

Maguire portrays a realist on film. And he genuinely needs the mask of Spider-Man to become the perfect composite sketch of heroisms. Peter Parker is constrained by the limitations posed by reality, but the mask allows him to free himself from his inhibitions.

Only by dawning the Spidey costume to play hero is the character able to overcome his difficult teen years and the early adult growing pains experienced when struggling to find a way to live independent from parents and family.

The villains are equally fascinating as grotesque recreations of real life adversaries posing as true barriers to everyday individual change.

The abortionist simultaneously limits and nurtures. Science creates and destroys. The Depression dismantled the promises of life and the love within families, but the characters that survived the economic turmoil became enriched by the experience. In the Great Gatsby (2013), opulence and excess erodes reason. 

Ever the realist, Maguire takes the audience through that real life oscillation between emotions and reason to show how those two human traits occasionally fall asunder from the real world and get stuck in fantasy.