Stories of spectacular rags to hideous riches are as American as apple pie – after all, what signifies the American dream more than someone making their fortune by grit, determination and a whole load of illegal activities? As a result, cautionary tales litter the cinematic landscape like broken dreams as filmmakers can’t seem to resist the lure of shiny things any more than the people who lived these actual events can. From mobsters to arms dealers, from wall street traders to drug peddlers, we love watching these people build themselves up and then watch the results of their avarice rip them to shreds before our very eyes.
A perfect example of this is Doug Liman’s American Made, a sensationalist retelling of the life and crimes of Barry Seal, a seemingly normal airline pilot who somehow starts to work for the CIA and then falls ass backwards into smuggling cocaine shipments for the Medellín drug cartel.and dealing with the Nicaraguan Contras. Seems good work if you can get it – but as always, what comes up must come down.
It’s 1978 and perpetually unhappy Baton Rogue pilot Barry Seal longs to leave his job flying commercial flights for TWA – however when he runs into CIA case officer, Monty Schafer he soon discovers a rather novel way out. After Schafer corners him for smuggling cuban cigars into the country, Barry soon finds himself agreeing to flying reconnaissance missions over Central America in a private plane that’s tricked out with cameras a couple of years later, it eventually snowballs into Barry being asked to act as a courier between the CIA and General Noriega in Panama. While it seems that things have already gotten completely out of hand, it turns out that we’ve only scratched the surface when the Medellín Cartel get involved and demand that the pilot starts smuggling drugs back to the U.S. for them on his return trips and sure enough Barry starts dropping packages of cocaine in Louisiana.
With his life getting obscenely more complicated and risky by the flight, it looks like the DEA might have to get involved, but in an effort to preserve his pet pilot, Schafer relocates Barry and his now up to speed wife to Arkansas and sets him up with a new base of operations. However, it’s here where things soon start to get truly insane as the sheer amount of wealth that Barry’s generating means that he can greatly expand his operation with additional pilots and bigger planes which comes at a perfect when the call comes to start smuggling guns over to the Nicaraguan Contras.
Of course, as any pilot tells you, you can only climb for so long before gravity intervenes and soon Barry’s workload, added to the strain of his fuck-up brother in law, JB, means that reality starts to rudely intrude. With the CIA, the DEA and the Cartel tossing him back and forth like a hot, money-making potato, someone’s inevitably going to fatally drop the ball.
If I were to call things right down the middle, flashy biopics that sees some ordinary schmoe suddenly sell their souls down the river to see themselves with riches beyond their wildest are all pretty much the same when you strip them down to their basic roots. They all start with a hungry, enterprising man who suddenly finds a backdoor to success by pulling some sort of crime or scam that sees them hoovering up the illegal big bucks mostly on balls and moxy alone and as we follow his accent, we get an unabashed, super-montage as we bathe in pure wish fulfilment. Of course, no one can remain on such a winning streak forever and as meteoric as the rise of our anti-hero is, their crash back to earth is just as crazy. Obviously Brian De Palma helped lay down this patten with Scarface and Martin Scorsese pretty much perfected it with Goodfellas, but since then, other movies such as War Dogs, The Big Short, The Wolf Of Wall Street and Blow have followed this template to the letter and Doug Liman isn’t about to fuck with it now when he doesn’t have to.
So while American Made doesn’t exactly set the screen alight in terms of to raw originality, when it comes to following the established rules and pushing the craziness of the story, Liman manages to bang out a gripping, fast paced crime drama that mostly rockets along like it’s snorted some of Seal’s cargo.
All the bases are touched with ease. There’s excessive use of music from the time, actual news reports from the 80s that set the scene as Ronald Regan came into the White House and Liman shoots the whole thing with a reckless handheld style that sometimes verges on documentary, but as is the case with most movies of this ilk, the journey up is way more fun than the character’s eventual downward trajectory and as a result, the final third feels rather back heavy, leaving the film feeling like it’s slightly overlong.
However, a massive feather in American Made’s cap is that we have Tom Cruise starring in the first film in what seems like ages to cast him as an actual flawed human being in “normal” circumstances, and not some absurdly skilled variant of Ethan Hunt from the Mission: Impossible movies. In fact, I was surprised how refreshing it was to see the Cruiser play role that doesn’t involve him constantly risking his life at the drop of a hat – although I’m pretty sure he’s legitimately flying the actual plane at numerous points. Sure, the actor is required to deploy that megawatt charm as his character flaunts laws and borders in order to make the impossible possible, but it’s the most down to earth we’ve seen the guy in years and he really should think about taking up more roles that don’t require fighter jets or dangling off some sort of gargantuan structure. As is the case with movies of this type, the supporting cast usually blow by in a blur of old fashioned hair styles as we whip through the years, but Domhnall Gleeson manages to make an impact as the slimy CIA case officer who seemingly has no respect for human live. Similarly Sarah Wright manages to to well with the token wife role, but the likes of Jesse Plemons and Caleb Landry Jones are somewhat under utilised as the plot careens it’s way through the twisting politics of the passing years.
It’s hardly reinventing the wheel, but Liman sticks close enough to the Crazy Biopic Playbook to guarantee that American Made is also well made. The ending maybe a forgone conclusion to even those who aren’t familiar with the true story and those who are will no doubt complain about the wealth of factual inaccuracies that probably exist; but for another dose of that crazed, lunge for the American dream at any cost, American Made proves to be more than addictive enough.
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