Set on Cruise control
> There’s an incredible story to be told about the life of Barry Seal, but it’s buried under this superstar’s usual perfect heroics
NO OTHER star in Hollywood is quite as painstakingly constructed as Tom Cruise ( below). He’s the cowboy in the white hat for the modern era of cinema. He’s a flashback to the studio system in all its glory, when stars were an embodiment of a single ideal. He’s the glint of pristine white teeth and the tip of a pair of sunglasses. He’s Tom Cruise: American Hero.
Whatever oddities shape his life off camera, the onscreen Cruise is a celluloid god. He’s untouchable perfection.
When deployed in full force, it works perfectly. The Mission: Impossible franchise still reigns strong because the line between Ethan Hunt and Tom Cruise is almost negligible.
Hunt is the cocksure adrenaline junkie. And so is Cruise – that is, the Tom Cruise fed to us by Hollywood, the man who insists on performing his own stunts even as film studios beg him not to.
The problem is, American Made’s Barry Seal was a real person. And real people aren’t celluloid gods. They aren’t untouchable perfection.
To those who crossed his path, Seal’s pilot-turned-smuggler ways may have possessed a certain charming bravado (the perfect Cruise archetype), but that was far from his entire being.
He also had a selfdestructive level of arrogance; he pushed to cooperate with the US government not out of patriotic initiative, but because he’d do anything to save his own skin after getting caught.
Seal knew his close ties with the infamous Medellín Cartel, whose leadership included Pablo Escobar, was his ticket to freedom.
In the late 70s, he signed himself over to the DEA as an informant in order to escape jail time.
Eventually, he started helping the CIA smuggle arms and supplies into Nicaragua to help the Contra war effort, and his work landed him smack-dab in the middle of the Iran-Contra scandal of Reagan’s presidency. It also delivered him to the darkest of ends.
Seal’s life is fascinating, and complex, to behold; it’s just a shame that American Made ( above) finds interest only in the purely superficial. Deep in the shadows of each frame lies the real drama, the embattled concept of someone who saw himself as a family man and defender of America’s freedoms, and yet facilitated the rush of cocaine into the US to destroy the lives of its children.
It’s felt, but at no point is it ever confronted. A strange decision, certainly, for a story that presents itself as a classic fable.
The traditional rise-and-fall as retold over and over in history: the greed, the ambition, and the fulfilment of the American dream with too much full-bloodedness.
Ancient Greek mythology had Icarus; the Jazz Age had The Great Gatsby; 70s cinema had the Goodfellas; more recently, The Wolf of Wall Street took the archetype to some of its darkest and most hedonistic excesses.
All stories about men who feverishly chased their own undoing.
Now, how exactly could Barry Seal not think double-crossing a cartel to save himself a trip to jail was playing with fire? – The
Independent