In 1985, when the credits roll at the end of Top Gun, Cruise and Kilmer diverge. We can’t all walk in divine light, and Kilmer’s CV doesn’t communicate the same oppressive perfectionism as his old friend and rival. It’s messy. He was a working actor, and even at the peak of his stardom, he played bit parts in bad movies, made straight-to-video movies and made-for-TV movies and guest-starred on un-prestige TV shows like Numb3rs and Psych and provided the voice of the car in a Knight Rider reboot. He tried shit and pulled it off, he tried shit and failed, but he never stopped experimenting. When he’s engaged in these roles, regardless of their reputation or the size of the part or the context, he’s brilliant. He could also be checked out. The diamonds are covered in rough, but there are many to find.
What is stardom? What is “talent”, this rare quality we worship in this country in lieu of a compelling religion? I think it’s the ability to authentically portray yourself in art and in life, a know-it-when-you-see-it quality the Iceman had as much of, if not more than Maverick when he had his fastball going. It’s harder to see with Cruise, a towering and spotless persona who once flew too close to the sun on Oprah’s couch, gave us more than he was comfortable sharing, and spent the next two decades hiding in plain sight as Ethan Hunt.
It’s ironic coming from a Juilliard-trained, famously intense Method actor who was spouting crazy process shit to reporters when Jeremy Strong was still in grade school, but Kilmer was always himself, pulling off the magic trick of simultaneously being “Val Kilmer” and being William de Kooning without the viewer ever bumping on this tension. Being famous makes you crazy but you had the impression Kilmer came fully-formed, that he was like this when we met him. He was drunk and he was erratic and he said weird things and did weird things and he lived on a big weird ranch in the desert, as was his birthright, and he was also smart and sensitive and occasionally said incredibly profound things, and it all came from a place of open, vulnerable honesty. He wasn’t hiding anything from us.
Top Gun: Maverick is a finely tuned machine. For most of its runtime, it’s a perfect, smooth object, and there’s a version of it that is so perfect, so devoid of stakes, that it just kind of sails by, a cinematic Four Loko, or maybe a rail of coke. But nearly an hour in, everything slows down, and Maverick pays a visit to Iceman, who’s at home, because his cancer has recurred. Tom Kazansky is now a four-star admiral, the commander of the whole U.S. Pacific Fleet, but Kilmer’s wearing tortoise round glasses and a billowy scarf and his hair is slicked back and he looks both ridiculous and extremely cool, which you of course buy 100% immediately because, say it with me again, Val Kilmer is a fucking movie star.