ORDINARY SPORTS PEOPLE

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

It is among life's truly inviolable rules: never send any correspondence composed late at night, when your dander is up and your guard is down.

Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) knows that. He is a hot agent for Sports Management International--quick, glib and not given to deep thoughts. Still, one night at a corporate retreat, he drafts a manifesto--"The Things We Think and Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business"--distributes it to his colleagues, receives a round of hypocritical applause and then gets fired. Thus is Jerry Maguire the film set in motion. Maguire leaves S.M.I. with one client, an undervalued wide receiver named Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.), and an accountant named Dorothy Boyd (the gently winsome Renee Zellweger).

The scouting report on Jerry is that he's good at superficial friendships, not so hot at more intimate ones. The game plan of writer-director Cameron Crowe's intricate, insinuating comedy is to get his protagonist into the end zone of emotional maturity with no more than minor injuries. For a guy like Jerry, this is pretty much a Hail Mary play. For an actor like Cruise, it is a great broken-field run.

If Cruise can be said to have a career problem, it is that people find it hard to believe that such an attractive star can act at all--let alone act brilliantly. But Cruise has always been wonderful at suggesting the vulnerability beneath American volubility, the wistfulness lurking below a wise guy's surface, the educability of egocentricity. But he's never had an opportunity to display those qualities with the subtlety Crowe provides him here.

Not that his Jerry is the whole show. Gooding's Tidwell can talk truth as well as trash. Funny and flamboyant as he is, he's a ferocious exponent of family values, stated with a lack of cant. He has a lot to teach Jerry about loyalty and its rewards.

So does Dorothy. Hiding a romantic soul under a patient and realistic manner, she's just the woman to keep a grounded high-flyer functioning out of a home office. And to show him that love is something more than a contact sport.

As a name for a film, Jerry Maguire is less a title than a label. But in its refusal to pump up the volume, it catches the quietly confident spirit in which this movie has been made. Neither Crowe nor his actors appear to be working hard for hilarity, high romantic tension or a melodramatic denouement. They make no attempt to either glamorize or deglamorize athletes and their hangers-on. There is a recognizable ordinariness about the way these people stumble in and out of trouble, in and out of grace--an ambiguous note, at once tart and sweet, knowing and innocent, in their relationships. This is completely unexpected in a big, star-driven holiday release. And altogether wondrous.

--By Richard Schickel