Tom Cruise Respects The Cocktail

I recently rewatched a movie that I’m pretty sure made some sort of sense in its time that has not aged well yet I’m pretty sure has become more entertaining; I’m talking about Cocktail, a film about the lifestyle of bartenders with Tom Cruise in the lead role. Hollywood has a long tradition of making movies that exploit niche careers and hobbies into movies that grossly misrepresent and glamorized them. Hell, Tom Cruise has even been in some of the more successful ones.

Normally these types of movies choose a niche career that most people don’t know much about so that they can inaccurately portray this lifestyle and give it some mystique. Most of us moviegoers aren’t pro surfers, breakdancers, street race drivers, supercross bikers, or jet pilots; but we’re willing to watch a movie about these subjects because they’re briefly interesting and since we don’t know much about them the filmmakers can slide a couple fast ones by us and make the whole lifestyle seem all the more fascinating. I mean, I saw Top Gun, and I doubt if the American Air Force is cool with cocky assholes who have no respect for authority buzzing dangerously close to the control tower so that they can make everybody inside spit their coffee, laugh arrogantly at them over the open radio and then go and literally fuck their superiors, but if this film is accurate it would explain why the U.S. hasn’t had to resort to conscription in a long time. But the point is that not many people are jet pilots and only a few more really know anything about it so most people can accept a pretty stupid movie glamorizing them.

But Cocktail chooses to be a movie trying to bring mystique to the world of bartending, and the last time I checked most of us have performed the pouring motion in our own homes since as early as three years of age. The idea of opening a can or pouring something into a glass and setting it on a counter really just isn’t some mystic skill you can dress up, but they sure try.

You’ve got this guy called Coughlin, who acts as Obi-Wan Kenobi in terms of mentoring young Tom Cruise in all the vast wisdom that comes from aiming a liquid stream into a glass for several decades. Coughlin speaks in all sorts of pearls of philosophy about conjuring up magic and about how people will be dazzled by bottlework and the importance of fancy showmanship, and he does it with so much conviction that you almost forget he’s talking about bartending. The kind of insight he spouts out might make sense in a movie like The Prestige or something but for fuck’s sake, this is a career based on pouring and some mixing. The other day I went to Subway to get a sandwich meal. They just gave me an empty paper cup and told me to serve myself at the bank of clearly labelled fountains nearby. I poured in some Coke, mixed with a quick zap of Barq’s Root Beer, and two shots Sprite and it tasted pretty fucking good but I don’t go strutting around acting like I’m Morpheus or whatever. I guess one thing they do is juggle the bottles a bit, but most people stop being amused by juggling long before they’re old enough to be hanging out in bars, so forgive me for not being impressed.

I also hate to sound cynical, but isn’t the entertainment value of bars to go and pull sluts or at least oogle them? You frequently hear them advertise “ladies night” at bars, but you never hear “jugglers’ night”. One of the weirdest scenes in this movie is when Cruise hits the big time as a bar tender (which means working as a bar tender in a larger louder place than usual). Everybody’s dressed all skanky and dancing to loud dance music when they shut down the music for this guy dressed like a dork to perform a little poem about the cynical unfeeling pettiness of capitalism. This skanky trendy club crowd didn’t really seem like the ideal audience for satirical Marxist performance poetry, but they took to it with surprising enthusiasm. Cruise retorts with an improvised poem about the glory of alcohol and this smug crowd seems to really appreciate it too. Watch out Paul Oakenfold, iambic pentameter is back on the block!

But other than his juggling and his two poems, this movie is still stuck with about an hour and half to make setting beverages on counters fascinating. We’ve seen movies about people with less than fascinating stations in life turn out to be entertaining before, based on the strength of the characters and the drama. So let’s have a look at what kind of man Tom Cruise plays in Cocktail.

He plays a guy who keeps talking about wanting to make it big in business and he talks endlessly about how he’s got all these great ideas. The film opens with him getting out of the military and arriving in New York in a montage of applying for jobs. I’m not sure why all these companies waste the time to give him interviews only to tell him he’s not qualified to do anything in their organizations, but it sure is funny. I’d really like to know what he wrote on his resume. Probably something like this:

Deer Large Orjanizaytion,

I wood like to run you. Ive got grate ideas like profit and shit. Seriuslee.

~Tom Cruise

They tell him he has no education, so he tries to get some. He goes to community college and takes a small business admin course which is taught by a pompous Solomon Rushdie-esque tyrant who speaks in a pretentious accent and literally throws the students’ papers around the room and fails everybody. The professor screeches and berates Cruise about the absurdity of his idea to open a pub attached to a shopping plaza, an idea that I think was actually already in wide use in 1988. Cruise retorts saying that the prof doesn’t know shit because he just hides out at community college behind theories that he never has to apply in the real world.

What. The. Fuck. This situation might make sense in an more vague arts program at a proper Ivy League University or even in that school from that show Fame where if the kids wanted fame they had to understand that fame costs and right there was where they were going to start paying for it, in sweat. But this is an evening course in business management at community college where you’re lucky if you get an animatrom that speaks your language let alone a human who actually shows up to drunk to give everybody an A and then buggers off. I’d hate to see who this college has teaching the ring soldering program, probably fuckin’ Barishnikov or somebody.

Anyway, Cruise keeps talking about all these big great business ideas he claims to have but when he finally reveals what his revolutionary business idea is we find out it’s to take an already successful business and stick a big neon sign on the front. There are endless scenes where he keeps describing himself as a business genius and he even becomes a boytoy gigolo for an older corporate exec so that he can try to get her to suggest his brilliant ideas to the board of directors. The scene where he finally draws his ideal sign on a cocktail napkin is kinda the ‘rosebud’ of this picture.

Cruise plays this character with his trademark intensity, and for that I’m grateful. Casting he and Elizabeth Shue to play these roles straight makes the comedy of this film feel much more unintentional and therefore more my thing. For the time when this film came out I could realistically see it being done with Woody Harrelson and Goldie Hawn and played as a straight up comedy, but this way is much better. Especially the scene where Cruise tries to explain to Shue that the only reason he cheated on her was because it was a dare. He says this totally straightfaced like he fucked that other lady to save a village or something. It’s possible that this weird discussion of infidelity in Cocktail is what got Stan “The Man” Kubrick thinking of casting him in Eyes Wide Shut.

For the most part Tom Cruise’s career as an actor has been a textbook guide to success of picking hit movies and working with significant and talented directors. I know a lot of people give him shit for being short and crazy, but it’ll take more than short and crazy to turn me against the guy. To me, those are good qualities. Just look at Warwick Davis or your penis, they’re short and crazy and you don’t hate them. Cocktail is one of the few times where a Tom Cruise movie was not a noteworthy film and not even an unimportant film directed by a noteworthy director. The guy who did this went on to an okay career or passable to forgettable films including the film I saw last week called The Bank Job. I’m willing to put money on Tom Cruise just being one of those guys who still finds it really funny when the word ‘cock’ shows up as part of another word and that’s why he did this. If you really want to get Cruise in your movie just call it The Peacock and he’ll probably sign up with a snicker.

I’m always the one demanding that films break out of conventional genre classification and this one definitely does that. This film delivers pretty good entertainment in that it’s so meandering and absurd that you can’t help but laugh in amazement. The straightfaced acting in really ludicrously written scenes also keeps it popping. I think some producer just wanted a film about bartending and nobody turned in a very good script so he just pasted bits from all of them together.

If there’s one thing I’d like them to change about this movie, it’s the main character’s name. Cruise plays a guy named Brian Flannigan, but I would’ve rather his name was John Cocktail. That would tie into the title better and make it seem like his destiny to tend bar was right under his nose the whole time. And it’s not like the screenwriters are above this, they named the character who has lots of money Mr. Mooney (the extra ‘o’ is to show that he has so much money it’s starting to turn into moolah).

I think it is also worth mentioning that action superstar Dolph Lundgren was discovered working as a bartender in New York City while studying science in the USA on an academic exchange. So there are good stories to be told about bar tenders and I would’ve preferred a Dolph Lundgren biopic to this, but maybe next time.

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May the Jordanafication and Brewsterization of Hollywood continue.