American Made

In one of de Sade's plays or novels, a jaded libertine salutes his cowering victim with words to this effect:  "Oh, how shall I be revenged upon you for the illusions that you create in me!"  A similar sentiment transfixed me while watching Tom Cruise in Doug Limon's gaudy American Made (2017).  Cruise plays a TWA pilot who bootstraps casual criminality (he smuggles Cuban cigars into the US through Canada) into a lucrative business arrangement with the CIA and, then, the Columbian drug cartel led by Pablo Escobar.  These transactions, in turn, leads our hero into exchanging guns for cocaine with the Contras and, ultimately, brings him into encounters with George Herbert Walker Bush and Olly North.  (The story is supposed to be a true one.  I will have to investigate this.)  Throughout these adventures, Tom Cruise flashes his million dollar grin at the camera which hovers, generally, about 18 inches from the star's face.  If you are like me, you are merely biding your time, awaiting the inevitable peripateia, the reversal of fortune that will wipe that smirk off Cruise's supernaturally handsome face.  The movie isn't half-bad, but it traffics mercilessly in the audience's desire to see Tom Cruise humiliated and, then, even destroyed.  I can't think of any other star, except perhaps Madonna, who could entrap her audience so intensely in a love-hate relationship of this sort.  (It speaks volumes for Cruise's thousand watt grin that when he gets roughed-up and loses a tooth, everyone immediately notices and comments.) 

Cruise plays a vicious character, but, of course, is too big of a star to really impersonate a man of bad character -- instead, we are invited to impute the character's evildoing to boyish high-jinks, a volatile temperament, and a low threshold for boredom.  (In an early scene, Cruise intentionally pilots a TWA jet so as to cause luggage to drop from the overhead bins as well as to deploy the oxygen masks -- it's supposed to be a funny joke, but one that is disturbing:  the camera's close and affectionate embrace of Cruise makes us identify with him, but what about the sleeping businessmen and infants rudely terrorized in this way?)  As the movie progresses, Cruise runs money to Noriega in Panama, then, exchanges guns for cocaine with the cartel, supplying weapons to the contras, many of whom are transported to the hero's compound in Mena, Arkansas where Cruise' character, named Barry Seal, is supposed to train them for insurgencies in central America.  It's pretty glib and played for cynical laughs and the audience is asked to invest in a wild fantasy of impunity -- no matter what anyone says or does, Seal just keeps getting richer and richer and more insulated from the consequences of his acts.  In one scene, he is simultaneously arrested by the FBI, the  DEA, the ATF, and local Arkansas police.  But a couple scenes later, the requisite strings having been pulled, Governor Clinton himself springs our hero from the pokey.  (This is similar to an early scene in which Seal arrested with Pablo Escobar is released from a Columbian jail through the intervention of the CIA.)  Many critics have compared the film with Scorsese's Goodfellows and, in some respects the movies are similar -- the hero, who expects to be betrayed by the CIA, records his confessions onto video tapes and this provides a framework for his antics, anchoring the narrative in the grainy video that Seals is producing.  A better comparison, however, is Scorsese's glossy and utterly vacuous, The Wolf of Wall Street -- like that film, the movie glories in showers and cascades of greenbacks.   These films are fantasias of greed and we watch stupefied as the hero gets richer and richer and richer, all the time resenting the hero's impunity and glamor, and licking our chops in anticipation of his inevitable comeuppance --  films of this sort (and I count Netflix Ozarks among this number) are symphonies of resentment. 

Cruise is perfect for the role although the extent of his acting is sometimes looking a little sweaty.  The film is colorful and features many gorgeous shots of planes flying over tropical beaches, warm oceans, and ravaged Latin American mountains.  The minor characters are all underwritten and scarcely do more than offer caricatures -- the sexy, loyal, if dimwitted wife, the narco-trafficker, the dullard local gendarme in Arkansas, the moronic, stoner brother-in-law, and the various sinister black-suited factotums of the Federal government.  The narrative sets up a scene in which Barry Seal is complicit in the death of his brother-in-law -- we expect this sequence to engender some remorse in the hero, or, at least, inflict some damage on his picture-perfect marriage to his picture-perfect Barbie doll wife.  But no such thing.  This sequence, uncharacteristically grim for this lighter-than-air picture, just vanishes.  However, the scene casts a long shadow over the end of the movie and essentially wrecks it.  Seal's hapless brother-in-law is killed by the cartel when his car is booby-trapped and explodes.  We see the man get into his car, turn on the ignition, and, then, drive a couple hundred yards before the vehicle blows up.  In the last reel, Seal is on the run and, each time he turns on his car, he winces as if expecting it to blow-up -- in fact, he even urges bystanders to step away from where his car is parked.  But this makes no sense because we have seen that the booby-trapped car starts completely normally, idles without incident, and only blows up after being driven some distance.  Thus all of Seal's wincing when he turns the key in the ignition, his warnings to bystanders, makes no sense at all -- if the car is going to explode, this will happen after it has been driven for a block or so.  Ultimately, the film is entertaining and induces a strong Schadenfreude in the audience based upon our distaste for Tom Cruise -- it's an okay movie, not really memorable, but handsomely designed and mounted.  (Wikipedia assures me that the film is mostly accurate, although Barry Seal was much more corrupt than shown in the picture -- he was, in effect, a small town southern "bag man" and drug smuggler, tied in with the corrupt Clinton administration in Arkansas.  Curiously, the same role was played by Dennis Hopper in a film called Doublecrossed released in 1991.)