Cruise rogues it up in ‘American Made’
Barry Seal, a real-life, albeit minor, figure in the Iran-contra scandal, takes center stage in the fact-based yet heavily fictionalized "American Made," with such major figures as Oliver North (Robert Farrior) and Ronald Reagan (depicted in archival news clips) relegated to the periphery.
Directed by Doug Liman from a cheeky screenplay by Gary Spinelli, the antic saga unfolds from the point of view of Barry (Tom Cruise), beginning in 1978 as a series of darkly comic flashbacks, all of which are interspersed with Barry's unreliable, hindsight-is-20/60 video-diary narration from late 1985 and early 1986, just before the film's improbable but true-ish events come crashing down around him.
The Barry we first meet is as much Cruise as Seal, a roguish TWA pilot who is at once more handsome and charming than the guy on whom this story is based ever could have been, and less straight-arrow a character than we're used to seeing the actor play. As the film opens, Barry is shown creating tur- bulence from the cockpit of his plane, jerking the nose of his jet violently up and down to wake his sleeping copilot. "Sully" Sullenberger he ain't.
Almost immediately thereafter, Barry is shown being recruited by a CIA handler called, pseudonymously, "Schafer" (Domhnall Gleeson), to undertake an aerial photo reconnaissance of insurgents in Central America. Just as quickly, this patriotic mission leads to a side gig as a drug courier for the Medellin cartel in Colombia, through a combination of cinematically convenient but historically implausible coercion and sweet-talk — involving an offer of $2,000 per kilo of cocaine transported.
Before you know it, Barry is simultaneously running drugs, weapons and the Nicaraguan freedom fighters known as contras between South and Central America and his home base in Mena, Arkansas, where he employs a crew of four fellow pilots, all under the winking eye of "Schafer." There's so much cash being made that it overflows from Samsonite suitcases, with bills sticking out like cartoonish corruption markers.
And that's really what "American Made" is: a cartoon.