So heres the thing: You have to realize just how radical it was that this nobody, who looked not so much like the sort of actress who would star in a Tom Cruise movie as the personal assistant to the sort of actress who would star in a Tom Cruise movie, was suddenly
starring in a Tom Cruise movie. There was a Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind vibe to it. Zellweger had won the lottery, had been plucked from semi-obscurity by the movie gods (or, actually, by the daring of Cameron Crowe), but not because it was so unusual to see a non-famous actress starring in a major movie. What was unusual, to the point of breaking the rules, was the way that she looked. In 1996, Tom Cruise was still the biggest movie star in the galaxy, and he didnt make films with just anyone. He worked with costars who reinforced his supernova status, through their fame or their beauty or both. Zellweger, with pillowy cheeks and quizzically pursed lips and that singular squint, was beautiful, but not in the way that a Nicole Kidman or a Julia Roberts was. She was beautiful in the way an ordinary person is (even that name sounded like it hadnt been to Hollywood yet), in a way that came from outside the Tom Cruise paradigm. And that, in the end, was exactly what the movie was about: Could Cruise, as Jerry Maguire, leave aside his Cruise-control mystique to embrace something real? You complete me is one of the great lines in modern romantic movies because of the way it takes its inner meaning from who Renée Zellweger is. This is what completes you: someone who looks just like this. What completes you is reality.
Zellweger was no flash in the pan, but after Jerry Maguire, she struggled to find roles that could complete her. It wasnt until Bridget Joness Diary, five years later, that she hit her stride by finding a role that jelled with her image as an extraordinary ordinary girl. It may sound like Im being patronizing, but if you go back and look I mean really look at the old Hollywood stars, who we think of as some of the most incandescent people of the 20th century, the truth is that if you forget their iconic status for a moment, a lot of them were highly idiosyncratic-looking. To name two obvious examples: Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. But more tellingly, on the actress side of things, just think of Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Fontaine, Bette Davis radiant sensual goddesses all, but sorry, these werent the beauty contest winners. They looked like heightened versions of us.
Today, more than ever, movie stars look like models, and theres a pressure on them to conform to certain standards. The amount of cosmetic surgery that goes on in Hollywood would shock almost anyone who learned about it, because the truth is that a great many stars who dont look nipped and tucked, and who publicly decry plastic surgery, have had the work done. But that, by definition, is to keep them looking younger, to keep them looking like themselves. (Thats why you cant tell.) The syndrome were talking about is far more insidious, because when you see someone who no longer looks like who they are, its not necessarily the result of bad cosmetic surgery. Its the result of a decision, an ideology, a rejection of the self.
