Steve Braunias: Tom Cruise cast as an 18th century maverick poet

Tom Cruise - from pilot to poet in Steve Braunias' new script. Photo / Getty Images

Steve Braunias casts Tom Cruise as a maverick poet

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)! You don't hear all that much about him these days. The vogue for deformed little poets – tuberculosis of the spine gave him a hunchback and stunted his growth at 4'6"; Dr Johnson writes of Pope's seat needing to be raised to bring him level at dining tables – who wrote rhyming couplets in iambic pentameters seems to have passed. But the life of one of the greatest writers in the English language would make such a sad and beautiful film.

Alexander Pope, played by … Tom Cruise. The height is about right and everything about Pope was maverick. We see him over the opening credits being lifted out of bed – he was too weak for such a vigorous task – and being laced into a bodice made of stiff canvas. We see sheets of writing paper on the bed. He would call at all hours for fresh paper to pen his poems. We see his hunched back, his wasted limbs. Dr Johnson, again: "His legs were so slender that he enlarged their bulk with three pairs of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid." Finally, we see his face: and actually it is a fine and handsome face, full-lipped, with bright, shining eyes.

Alexander Pope, prodigy. "No other work by so young a writer has so many sayings that have become common property," John Sargeaunt writes in a 1924 study of Pope's poem "An Essay on Criticism", written when he was 23. ("Fools rush in where angels fear to tread", "To err is human, to forgive, divine", etc). We see his smooth skin, his firm teeth. Tom Cruise was born for this role.

Alexander Pope, one of the most famous men in England in the 18th century, was recognised as a genius and duly regarded with awe. We see him gadding about in the great homes of the gentry. Lords and ladies are desperate to catch a glimpse of the author of "The Rape of the Lock", that strange and mocking poem about a scandalous incident in English high society. When Pope was told the tale, his genius improvised a long, narrative poem. Everyone read it, talked about it, celebrated it. We see Tom Cruise flashing his beautiful Tom Cruise smile as the celebrity author; but behind the fame and adoration is a broken heart.

"Alexander Pope," I said, when I gave a talk four weeks ago to the Masters of Creative Writing Class at the University of Auckland and was asked who I was reading at the moment; "Alexander Pope," I said again, to the same question on Monday night, when I gave a talk at the Northern Club. Both audiences – anxious writers, comfortable merchants ("I own an advertising agency") – responded with a baffled silence. Pope who? But how their hearts would be moved in the Mission: Pentameter movie starring Tom Cruise as the grotesque weakling who at 19 meets and falls in love with Martha Blount, 17, fair-haired with "wild yet gentle slanting blue eyes", as described by Pope's biographer Edith Sitwell. "They walked together in the forest and gathered the warm apricots and nectarines from the walls of her enclosed garden." We see young Pope/Cruise feasting on the warm stonefruit, deeply happy, though he was later to write, "Help me through this long disease, my life."

Alexander Pope, esquire. He made a fortune when he translated Homer's The Iliad. It was a publishing blockbuster. "Never had any poet been so highly paid before, not has any been so highly paid since," writes Sitwell, in her 1930 biography. He bought a large estate in Twickenham, and entertained the good and the great. But he was alone. He moved in silence and shadows. His love for Martha Blount never ceased; and it was never requited. We see Cruise/Pope tormented in candlelight, writing with his trembling quill, "Was I born for nothing but to write? Has life no joys for me?"

Alexander Pope, made miserable by critics and other drudges who were repulsed by his body – he was called sub-human, "a monkey" - and envious of his genius. The film's closing scene recreates the amazing grotto that Pope had excavated in an underground tunnel at his Twickenham estate. He decorated the walls with ores, stalactites, crystals, diamonds, marbles, alabaster and snakestones, and hung a lamp in its middle. "A thousand pointed rays glitter and are reflected over the place," he wrote. It was a private wonderland. We see his face and little broke frame in this heaven beneath the earth; and he is luminous.