American Made

American Made (dir. Doug Lyman, 2017) is one of several films and books I’ve encountered recently that highlight the early 1980s and the murky moral climate of the U. S. conduct of domestic and foreign affairs.  In this film, a pilot for TWA named Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) is recruited by the CIA to fly to Central America and take surveillance photographs of sensitive areas, mainly in Columbia, Panama, Columbia, and nearby countries.  He’s successful at this mission and draws attention to himself.  Members of the Medellin cartel recruit him to deliver drugs to the U. S. The CIA overlooks this activity because he’s so successful at reconnaissance.  Then the CIA recruits him to deliver weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras, and to ferry trainees from that country back and forth to a location in Louisiana for training.  Seal ends up working with Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, delivering drugs and accepting payoffs.  He diverts some of the weapons intended for the Contras to the cartel.  The CIA is aware of all this activity and tolerates it, keeping the Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI and other law enforcement off Seal’s back because of his success as a reconnaissance photographer. Seal finally manages to deliver photos to the CIA of Columbian drug lords and the Contras accepting drugs and money. However, when these photos are leaked, Seal becomes a liability, and the CIA cuts him off, disavows all knowledge, and leaves him defenseless—he’s later assassinated by the cartel.

The film frames Seal’s experience as an American dream narrative—a man makes good, becomes rich, his family enjoys the wealth.  But what lesson is being drawn? Seal and his wife seem indifferent to, unaware of, the moral issues of what he does and of their newfound wealth—the film suggests that his involvement in these affairs played into the larger Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s (Oliver North makes an appearance). For Seal, this is all a rollicking turn of extreme fortune, a windfall, an adventure. The film is somewhat toneless in its portrayal of Seal. Events are shown as if they're part of a home movie--without irony or satire or condemnation.  This may be the film's method: to let the story stand on its own and to rely on the audience to draw obvious conclusions.  This is not necessarily a safe strategy: many viewers may applaud Seal for taking advantage of opportunities as they come to him.

Tom Crews plays Seal.  Crews is a good actor, though most of the roles he’s played recently in Jack Reacher and Mission Impossible films have been fairly generic. His role in this film is somewhat more specific and textured, but he struggles a bit to fill it.  His wide, toothy grin does suggest the vacuity of Seal’s character, his inability to recognize what he has become.  Domhall Gleeson (who played one of the Weasley brothers in the Harry Potter films) is effective as the soulless CIA agent who recruits Seal.

Barry Seal is based on the actual person who did become an informant for the CIA and drug enforcement, but the details of the real Seal’s life vary significantly from the life shown in the film, which is entirely fictional. The film may have been inspired by real people and events, but it doesn’t present them.