CONTRA-VERSIAL
Film sees darkly funny side to drug smuggling, arms dealing and colonial nation building
I have to wonder if, 30 or 35 years hence, someone will make a jaunty, slightly zany comedy about what we now consider Important Current Events. I picture slamming doors as Russians run in and out of clandestine meetings, with a subplot in which a tubby, paranoid leader with a weird haircut threatens nuclear annihilation, while on the other side of the world Kim Jong-un does likewise.
American Made, directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Edge of Tomorrow) and starring Tom Cruise’s grin, manages to craft a pretty decent dark comedy out of all the drug smuggling, arms dealing and colonial nation building that would eventually culminate in the Iran-Contra affair.
Cruise plays Barry Seal, the youngest 707 pilot in the employ of TWA. (Don’t Google his name or you’ll ruin what might be deemed “the surprise.”)
Barry is bored — sometimes he creates turbulence on flights just for fun — so when CIA handler Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson) offers him a job doing photo reconnaissance over South and
Central America, Barry accepts.
He also accepts an offer from the Medellin drug cartel to fly cocaine back into America at $2,000 a kilo. And an offer to run guns to the U.S.-backed rightwing Contras. And an offer to fly Contras to a training base in Arkansas. In short, Barry seems never to have met an offer he could refuse, although to be fair, some of them are couched in the language of “... or would you rather be in a Colombian prison?”
The tale unfolds at breakneck pace and with Liman’s trademark, inexplicably shaky camerawork.
We see Cruise’s character figuring out how best to deliver large quantities of cocaine — basically, he does bombing runs over the swamps of Louisiana, dropping drugs wrapped in life jackets — while avoiding DEA aircraft and keeping his wife in the dark about the true nature of his work.
In Gary Spinelli’s screenplay, however, Barry’s biggest problem is what to do with all the cash he’s raking in. One scene finds him throwing money at his problems, while in another he opens a closet and is buried in an avalanche of cash; a gag straight out of the old radio show Fibber McGee and Molly.
The nature of his operations necessitates a number of real-world cameos, including Pablo Escobar, Manuel Noriega, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton and a thinly disguised George W. Bush. In addition, there’s Sarah Wright as Barry’s wife, and Caleb Landry Jones as her no-good hillbilly brother, who buys himself a Gremlin automobile with Barry’s money, but never thinks to purchase a shirt.
Cruise’s insouciant attitude linked to Barry’s devil-may-care optimism may have you rooting for the smuggler even as the alphabet-soup forces of the DEA, CIA, FBI and ATF close in.
If comedy is indeed tragedy plus time, then we’ve had just enough time since the 1980s to chuckle at one of its more tragic narratives.