There’s a strong argument that insists Tom Cruise is a more
compelling screen presence the more desperate he’s seen to get. Much evidence
for this claim was gathered in that millennial run – 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia, 2001’s Vanilla Sky
– in which varyingly forceful writer-directors did their level best to chip
away at their star’s glib toothpaste-salesman confidence and expose the very
human doubts and frailties behind it. After those box-office failures, Cruise
retreated to the surety of known properties and franchises; though we got
glimpses of other Cruises – notably Tropic
Thunder’s Comic Cruise – this was his fall-back position up until this
June’s disastrous The Mummy. Possibly
audiences had grown tired of watching a performer playing it so consistently safe:
as Kubrick and P.T. Anderson had twigged, it’s always more revealing watching a
control freak losing control.
American
Made,
which feels like a career progression if not the awards-season bar-setter all
involved maybe hoped, hands Cruise a very promising character part: that of
Adler Berriman “Barry” Seal (1939-1986), prime mover in one of those just-declassified,
you-couldn’t-make-it-up stories that sporadically present to grateful producers.
A morally flexible TWA pilot handpicked by the CIA at the dog-end of the 1970s
to assist with their Central American operations, Seal wound up flying for both
the Agency and local drug cartels, profiting hugely from his own machinations
while holding court with the likes of Pablo Escobar and Oliver North. Buffeting
around inside the fuselage rather than clinging clench-jawed to its exterior,
Cruise’s Seal is something like Top Gun’s
Maverick gone to seed; the welcome surprise of Doug Liman’s film is that the
character’s cockiness comes to be tested rather than hymned.
The first time we see him, he’s literally going nowhere:
restlessly holding his position in runway traffic in 1978. (Liman has already
set the stagnant scene with President Ford’s doomy prediction “the next five
years will be worse than the past five”. 2017 audiences may wonder what, if
anything, has changed.) Seal’s yen for risk-taking is established when he
pushes his craft into a nosedive just for the shits-and-gigs of waking up a
dozing co-pilot (“just a little turbulence, folks”). Subsequent misadventures
will grant him excitement, mobility and more turbulence yet. Impressing CIA
operative Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson) with his flak-dodging surveillance work, he’s
soon trafficking U.S. guns to the Contras; with those passed on, the Medellin
cartel invites him to fill his Cessna with cocaine for transportation north – a
lucrative offer this gadfly couldn’t refuse, yet came to regret.
Liman – whose work has grown steadily more engaged since his
blithe breakthrough Swingers, initiating the Bourne series and the recent
Iraq-set genre quickie The Wall –
gives a lightly satirical swing to Seal’s uplift. Breezily sketching in geopolitics
with hand-drawn maps (which occasions a sharp joke on the inability of some to
tell one Central American destination apart from another), he finds new ways to
polish the central irony of Gary Spinelli’s script: that his anti-hero was both
product and casualty of Reaganomics, a delivery boy momentarily handed half the
world on a platter. Seal’s conspicuous wealth generation is forever undercut by
inserts of later, self-taped depositions, those of someone haunted by the knowledge
these might be his only legacy, and that this may be his last chance to offer it. What price a
man’s life?
That back-and-forth invests American Made with rather more credible peril than has been on
display in the last few Mission: Impossibles. Drug-running proves a risky business even with the Escobars at
one’s back, and Liman gives a visceral kick to those scenes which find the
increasingly frantic Seal taking off from untested runways, making a
single-handed coke drop barely a thousand feet above the ground or making an
emergency landing to evade Customs officials, the latter a near-miss that feels
dramatically trumped up – big Dolby swooshes, a flash of CGI – yet still
succeeds in making the stomach lurch.
The hopping around risks inducing discombobulation or jetlag
in the viewer, yet it appears a considered editorial tactic, intended to shake
up a generally self-assured leading man. Even with both feet on the ground,
Cruise isn’t entirely safe. When Gleeson’s Schafer first confronts Seal with
evidence of illegal cigar-smuggling, that familiar grin first freezes, then
dies on the actor’s face, as though April Grace’s Magnolia journalist had just walked into the bar. As Seal rolls and
lurches through this plot, Cruise sweats and panics in ways Jack Reacher
wouldn’t countenance; in jail, the character even loses a tooth, albeit a
discreet back molar. (Nobody’s paying to see Tom Cruise turn into Walter
Brennan just yet.)
A little of that insecurity feeds back into the film. As War Dogs – last year’s name-director-does-recent-foreign-policy
offering – suggested, just because a story in the Times or Post catches our
eye, it doesn’t automatically generate characters we want to sit in the dark
with for two hours. (Liman concedes as much in spinning Talking Heads’
“Slippery People” just as Seal has evaded three branches of law enforcement
simultaneously.) Still, the film has just about enough going on around its
anti-hero to sustain the interest and land its punchline, and there are signs
Liman (who repeatedly bumped his star off in 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow) is solving the enduring problem of making a
Cruise film that’s not wholly about its leading man.
If Jesse Plemons and Lola Kirke’s pairing as a shrugging
sheriff and his more vigilant wife looks to have been a lamentable cutting-room
casualty, others have the time to make more persuasive and valuable
contributions: the emergent Sarah Wright Olsen impresses as Seal’s wife Lucy,
calling out her man’s wilder manoeuvres on the homefront, and Caleb Landry
Jones is touching as a tragically weak link in the whole criminal enterprise.
The draw, however, remains Cruise, figuratively walking out on a wing; whether
multiplexers rejoin him there will be seen, but after endless formula runouts,
it’s encouraging to see him being properly exercised again.
Grade: B
American Made opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.
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