‘American Made’: Don’t think too hard, and you’ll enjoy the Tom Cruise film.
“American Made” is entertaining and brisk; and best of all, it stars Tom Cruise, whose work ethic is always to break a sweat, in every movie and in practically every scene. So this is a picture with lots of velocity and charm, and both of those go a long way. That’s practically the whole ballgame. People will like this movie. I pretty much liked this movie.
But: Even while we’re watching it, a funny feeling sets in. Lots of things happen in “American Made,” but it’s as if the frenetic pace is to keep us from thinking about what we’re watching. Something here just doesn’t add up —
not the character, not the story, not the zany-comic tone, not the whole situation. And having that feeling, this sense that something fundamental is off, spoils the experience somewhat — not completely, but measurably.
The movie purports to tell the true story of Barry Seal, a TWA pilot who became a drug smuggler for the Medellín cartel, a group that has not gone down in history as a barrel of laughs. The tone of “American Made,” however, is light, or at least glib. At the start of the film, Barry (Cruise) is lured away from TWA to do work for the CIA, taking pictures of leftist encampments in Central America and later airlifting guns to the Contra antigovernment forces in Nicaragua.
Barry’s motive seems to be money. He has a young family to support. He also seems to like living dangerously, or at least not mind it so much. In this way, he breezily stumbles into working for the Colombian drug lords, smuggling cocaine into the United States on CIA planes. For this, he gets paid $2,000 a kilo, and you can get a lot of kilos onto a CIA plane.
Having Cruise in the lead role brings some built-in advantages. We don’t want him to get caught. We don’t even want him to feel less pleased with himself. But because this is Tom Cruise, we expect, based on past experience, that the character he plays will operate out of some kind of internal logic. But here, if you follow the logic of the character, it argues against both the way the movie is written and the way Cruise plays him.
For example, though Barry wants money, he wants it for things like a refrigerator or a dishwasher. He never expresses the colossal greed that would drive a guy to keep risking a jail sentence, even when he’s already a millionaire 50 times over. Likewise, he never gives a thought to the fact that he’s working for murderers and bringing poison into his own country. Instead, he exists in a bubble of Cruise-like blitheness, a blitheness he can’t escape without taking down the movie’s entire tone. It’s as if the filmmakers wanted to tell Seal’s story but also to make something that felt like a Tom Cruise picture, but those two desires were at odds.
And so, unable to present a protagonist that makes sense, “American Made” tries something else. It insists that the world doesn’t make sense; thus, Barry is just going with the flow and getting carried along by events. One of the first things we hear on the sound track is President Jimmy Carter delivering his “crisis of confidence” speech from 1979. America is in a tailspin, and everybody is listening to disco, and feeling pessimistic, and not believing in the promise of the future. So in this context it makes sense to quit your job, go to work for the CIA and then for drug smugglers — except it doesn’t, not really.
Yet, here’s the bottom line: What are you more interested in? The true history of a drug smuggler or Tom Cruise? The people who wrote and directed “American Made” knew the majority response going in and made their movie accordingly.