Title: Cocktail

Year: 1988

Director: Roger Donaldson

Reviewed By: Garrett Chaffin-Quiray

Grossing $78 million at the US box office with a rentals return of some $36 million, Cocktail wasn�t a hit on par with Top Gun but it did accentuate the rise of its 26-year old star, and superstar-to-be, Tom Cruise. Telling the small-town-stagnation-to-big-city-success-story of Irisher Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise), Roger Donaldson�s summer sleeper from 1988 is often minimized as being little more than a primer about the Cruise phenomenon that took on truly epic proportions in the 1990s. Though the sentiment is undeniably part of the finished film, at least for those viewers unwilling to look beyond a trite plot, it ignores Cocktail�s impact, indeed its value, in the Cruise filmography as, perhaps, his most interesting work.

Beginning with Brian�s adventurous trip from his birthplace in the boondocks to the fertile pits of New York City, we meet him as an ambitious young man with verve and a vague idea about making it big. Unfortunately the concrete jungle chews him up, leaving him cast off and frustrated like so many dreamers before him. He finds himself turned down for job after job after job and feels bored by the filibustering of his college professors who speak from theory without the lessons of real world success or failure.

Forced to bartend to make ends meet, he senses his ultimate failure, especially since tending bar was the family business he was trying to escape in the first place. On a slow afternoon while studying books about entrepreneurship, he meets Doug Coughlin (Bryan Brown), a high-end Aussie bartender looking for an apprentice who subsequently introduces Brian to the social scene of Manhattan�s sparkling nightlife.

Together they form an awesome pair of wise cracking, poetry reeling drink slingers and rise to prominence on the upward spiral of the mid-�80s yuppie swing. They entertain lines of liquor swilling customers, date fast women, earn money hand over fist and have few, if any, meaningful responsibilities beyond pouring drinks and choreographing martinis to old R&B favorites.

When Brian meets the hot, lusty and connected photographer Coral (Gena Gershon), he figures he�s got it made with an affectionate lover, potential newspaper coverage and the potential to be a player in the world of adult fun and sin. Though his entrepreneurial splendor was first crushed by the big city, it is equally renewed with the idea of founding a bar franchise called "Cocktails and Dreams." Yet Brian is marooned after Doug seduces Coral to illustrate her usurious interests and their partnership ends with Brian careening into new adventures unforeseen before his first taste of the good life.

Turning up in one of Jamaica�s Club Med traps, Brian continues tending bar and dreaming of a better tomorrow. While there he meets the somewhat mysterious, but entirely lovely, Jordan Mooney (Elisabeth Shue), with whom he begins a vacation romance. They skinny dip in waterfalls, ride horses, dance and make eyes at each other with plenty of toothy smiles and close embraces on the way to falling in love.

Eventually, Brian bumps into Doug who turns up at his resort after having eschewed all personal ambition to marry the ultra-wealthy, seriously beautiful, and somewhat loose, Kerry (Kelly Lynch), who takes it for granted that her new husband is a doormat. Despite the trapping of married success, Doug demonstrates how the good life isn�t all it�s cracked up to be although Brian fails to heed the lesson and cheats on Jordan. Naturally she finds out and returns home to the upper echelon of Manhattan�s elite class with Brian�s bun in the oven, hurt and betrayed by his childishness but hopelessly loving his idealism and charm.

Unable to decide what to do, Brian turns to Doug but finds Kerry instead and finds her interested in consummating their friendship to one side of her husband�s better interests. Resistant and devoted to his wayward friend, Brian rejects Kerry but finds his once-thoughtful mentor dead from a suicide whereupon he returns to New York City, ready to accept his responsibilities and turn into the man he was always trying to become.

In the end he convinces Jordan of his devotion, as well as his intention to make it big in the bar business, and the two elope much to the chagrin of her parents. Going it alone they open the bedrock of his "Cocktails and Dreams" franchise from which he toasts his first group of devotees and the twins to whom Jordan will eventually give birth as the movie ends with the sweet sounds of an appealing soundtrack album.

What�s missing from this plot description is the way Cocktail organizes itself around a male coming-of-age story and sets this age-old plot against the backdrop of mid-�80s New York City, the symbol of American capitalism, fashion and style. Glitz is immediately a component of the production and so is the superficiality of the times filled in with shoulder-padded women�s suits, short skirts, billowing button-ups, feathered hair, technotrash music, neon lights and the plasticity of people inhabiting the frame as so many denizens of a wealthy epoch.

Untouched by the stock market crash of 1987, even concealed from such a possibility coming to pass in the first place, and strangely invocative of a glorious adult playground set above the normally drab world of office work and manual labor, Cocktail is a symbol for all that lies beneath as the sum of its basic components. Brian�s story is thus passively interesting because it�s what sets the whole thing in motion. Moreover, its Jamaican holiday is helpful for re-introducing Doug and the potential complications of someone like Jordan, both of whom are helpful in bringing about the denouement, but it�s the relentless, tawdry allure of New York City herself that buoys the film and keeps it alive.

Cruise�s young man is a glimpse of history recorded for the demands of posterity. His presence on magazine covers and in annual movies has become the stuff of automatic box office and celebrity approval but before 1989�s Born on the Fourth of July he was a gamble despite the appeals of Top Gun. In a similar vein, Shue in her post-Adventures in Baby-Sitting, pre-Academy Award nominated turn in Leaving Las Vegas, gives herself over to the documentation of times gone by but her capacity as a leading lady was something of a guess for the film�s casting director and in this risk is a rare chemistry, albeit one fueled by good music and sex appeal.

That Donaldson�s movie works as escapist melodrama depends largely on the Cruise/Shue pairing, if not on the appeals of Lynch�s bikini-clad body, the helicopter shots of Jamaican beaches or the fun of city life. At the heart of Cocktail, aside from the arc of these competing actors�s careers and the flora and fauna of their fantasy world, however, is the unstated class warfare of Manhattan�s cityscape and the accompanying kitsch of pop cultural refuse detailing the moment. Such material has also been the subject of novels like American Psycho and Bright Lights, Big City, along with movies as varied as Desperately Seeking Susan, Coming to America and Wall Street, each of which takes different views of the same meta-subject of what New Yorkers simply call "the city."

Manhattan is, therefore, the movie�s play land of possibility and erasure much like the entire enterprise of the cinema more generally. It arouses dreams and fantasies because in its teaming city of multiple millions virtually every ambition can be realized. But so can every failure and disaster and in this tense bind of utopian mirth with dystopian crisis is the grist hurling Cocktail towards its marshmallow ending after a few disruptions, most notably that of Doug�s bloody suicide.

Copyright of illustrations is the property of the production or distribution companies concerned. The images are reproduced here in the spirit of publicity and promotion of the films in question.