Tom Cruise gets his bum out in American Made. Twice, he moons. It’s pristine of course, as you’d expect from a 55-year-old man who can still get away with saying he’s in his thirties. It speaks volumes here, the exposed bum — a perfect summation of Barry Seal’s attitude towards the status quo, but also of the film itself, which breezes through increasingly murky worlds of criminality and corruption as if it were blowing one massive raspberry.
There’s a thrill in knowing it’s real.
This film was tailor-made for Cruise, so fits him perfectly. He and Seal, who quit his day job at TWA to get entangled with the CIA, would have been bosom buddies — by all accounts, Seal was fuelled by adrenaline, forever in search of a bigger hit and bigger stakes, and Doug Liman’s trip through his wildest years fully exploits Cruise’s own fetishes. That’s Cruise flying those planes zooming about the jungle (of course it is). Liman has recounted how hair-raising it was to be flying in a helicopter next to Cruise, filming him as, in a recreation of Seal’s own exploits, Cruise left the cockpit unmanned to scramble back to drop packages out of the floor hatch. And there’s a thrill in knowing it’s real.
Barry Seal did not look like Tom Cruise. Barry Seal weighed 20 stone and looked like a darts player, and in real life Pablo Escobar knew him as ‘El Gordo’ — the fat man. But all the filmmaking here is in service of Seal’s spirit. It goes out of its way to be scraggy, places and dates scrawled on the screen, handheld cameras scurrying around to catch the action. Gleeful recklessness sells reality, as do the performances, particularly those of the future Medellín cartel guys, who Seal attracts the attention of soon after he starts working for the CIA. They are threatening in their subtlety. The first time we see Escobar, he’s scoffing an orange, utterly menacing in his nonchalance. The film reeks of realness, and compared to Cruise’s recent run, a seemingly endless glut of outsized action, it’s all relatively down to earth.
And in keeping with Seal’s story, American Made never really slows down. Maybe that’s as it should be, in honour of its anti-hero, a man on a constant joyride. But being a big ball of fun hobbles the film somewhat. It doesn’t go deep, and rarely resonates. Sarah Wright is great as Seal’s wife, but despite sizeable screentime, the family scenes come across as a subplot. You long for more peaks and troughs, and some personal devastation.
The underlying themes, though, hit home. Seal’s family aside, everybody sees everybody else as currency. Everyone’s in it for themselves. Money trumps morals. Everybody’s Scarface. “All this is legal?” Seal asks Domhnall Gleeson’s CIA agent at the start. “If you’re doing it for the good guys,” he responds, the mere concept of ‘good guys’ long archaic.
