Sunny spell over, barbecues back in the shed. As the skies cloud, consider an evening under cover with American Made, a docudrama, starring Tom Cruise, detailing some of the bizarre hijinks that the CIA and other US agencies got up to in the 80s under Ronald Reagan.
For this, loosely – I stress VERY loosely – is the story of Barry Seal (Tom Cruise), a TWA pilot recruited by the CIA to spy on left insurgents in Central America. According to American Made, what started out as simple intelligence-gathering quickly metamorphosed officially into arms-running and support for US-backed militias in the area – the “Contras” - and unofficially, into industrial scale drug smuggling.
Then, after the CIA pulled the plug on that operation, Seal resurfaced as an informant and spy for the US Drug Enforcement Agency. The whole is confused and convoluted by the fact that various officials in the Reagan administration worked out that the only way they were going to be able to fund resistance was by selling drugs – thereby massively undercutting Reagan's very own war on drugs.
How much of this is true, how much speculation? We still don't really know the whole truth about what Reagan officials got up to, nor who knew what or when. As for Barry, the official version of the story is a lot less carefree, a lot more about an airpilot turned career criminal, who made millions from drugs before, of necessity, he was turned by law enforcement. So maybe Cruise's depiction of him is a lot more fictional than we are led to believe by the film's format. Or maybe it isn't.
One interesting side effect of claiming a basis in real life is that director Doug Liman manages to get away with a plot that in ordinary circumstances we would dismiss as just pure ridiculosity. But having lived through that period of history, I am less sure. Or less unsure.
Could a simple pilot really be so easily recruited to the CIA? Would they be so naïve as to let him get on with smuggling millions of dollars worth of cocaine into the USA in his spare time? And would he be so naïve as to think he could leave millions of dollars of cash just lying around his property in plain sight and no one would notice. It's all very implausible – but not absolutely unbelievable.
In American Made, Cruise seems to reprise his character from the Mummy, in the sense that he plays a man so far adrift from ordinary moral considerations that he would need a compass just to find his moral compass. An interesting decision given that once upon a time, A-listers, in whose number Cruise very definitely counts, would be very careful to avoid films that showed them in a bad or negative light.
Wife Lucy (Sarah Wright) provides about the right amount of spousal exasperation, while CIA handler, “Schafer” (Domhnall Gleeson) is an efficient mix of CIA arrogance and incompetence.
Otherwise, though this is very much a one-hander, with the camera and narrative both focused for most of the time on Cruise
Some viewers may find the narrative structure, with no clear stand-out moments of crisis or tension, to be disconcerting. That, though, seems to be standard for films delivered with a strong documentary streak: life is not neatly structured like a Shakespeare play; and the nearer one strays to reality, the less 'dramatic' the action.
For all that, an interesting and engaging film, from a genre that seems to appeal more to US film-makers than UK ones. That is: from Air America (to which this film bears passing ressemblance) to Wolf of Wall Street, Hollywood seems happy to generate a string of "loosely-based" docudramas with a very obvious rotter taking pride of place at the heart of the action.
Three and a half stars.
