K-SCORE: 10
Director: Roger Donaldson
Writer: Heywood Gould
Starring: Tom Cruise, Bryan Brown, Elisabeth Shue
Spoiler Level: Major (read the first and last paragraph for a spoiler-free review)
“The constant about-facing makes it absolutely worth watching, even though you are not going to be delivered anything close to the product the broad title promises and you’re not going to be delivered any competent story.”
Cocktail delivers an insanity that could not possibly have existed outside the 80s. I’m really struggling to describe it. I want to call it “quietly” crazy, but it’s really not quiet, or “subtly” psychopathic, but it’s really not subtle. Yet somehow the feeling you have watching any individual scene is that the film is fairly normal. Take a twenty minute section out of context, and you have a film squarely pointed in one direction, be that a film about a bartender learning to adapt to a crowded bar, a film about a New York floozy and friendship betrayal, a film about escaping to paradise and finding love in a tropical setting, a film about a spoiled rich girl and the less-than-affluent man she falls for, a story about… death? See? That’s the awesome problem Cocktail has! It keeps making these sharp left turns so that by the end of it, if you’re not totally lost, you’re laughing uncontrollably. I just wanted to watch a bartending movie. I wasn’t delivered that product at all, but what I was given was way way better in terms of joyous chaos.
“Two of the three of the film’s poems are delivered quickly and without context.”
From memory, I’m going to quickly run through what happens in Cocktail. It should mostly satirize itself. The film opens with Tom Cruise’s character, Brian Flanagan, and at least a half dozen other non-characters driving a car with one siren on the dash, forcing a Greyhound bus to the side of the road so that Brian can hop on board. On the bus, Brian holds a baby and talks about his and that baby’s future, as if it’s his. The baby and the woman next to him are never seen again.
Then, in what I would consider the first real section of the film, Brian tries to get jobs that require a business degree, can’t, and enrolls in business school. He gets a job as a bartender instead, working alongside Doug, who quickly becomes his mentor and best friend. Doug has deep-seated emotional issues (not depicted). After one night of being a bad bartender, overwhelmed with orders, Brian becomes a bartending savant, capable of spinning bottles and making a few hundred different cocktails from memory. His business school classes seem to be going poorly, but he and Doug form a hasty plan to open a bar called Cocktail and Dreams - bad name - and take no steps to furthering that goal apart from drawing the name in crayon and putting it on the refrigerator. In one of many of the film’s montages, a black guy screams across a loud bar that Doug and Brian should work for him. They say they’re not interested.
“Thankfully Brian is capable of providing such medical attention despite having no training.”
Cut to section two, them working in a very different bar that looks like a large pit-fighting arena where meaty Russian monsters would normally pound away on wimpy weaklings with gambling debts - only a bar has been plopped right in the center of it. Two of the three of the film’s poems are delivered quickly and without context. Brian meets a woman named Coral, played by Gina Gershon, who I thought was going to be the female lead for the rest of the film because we were already like thirty minutes in. She shows contempt for Doug (maybe spotting those not-depicted deep-seated emotional problems) and sleeps with Brian immediately. She’s very wealthy. Brian is quite happy. Doug loses $50 to Brian over the course of fifteen seconds of basketball, and to make the money back, Doug bets Brian that Coral will be with someone else by the end of the week. Cut to Doug and Coral making out in front of Brian right in the crowded bar. They get into the first of many fist-fights. I think Bryan Brown, the actor who played Doug, seriously hurt himself in that scene. The blood on his arm looked real, smeared over a nasty cut, out of focus, and off to the side of the frame.
Then we find ourselves in the tropics. (I-dunno) Brian finds a job working as a bartender at a little hut, making Mai Tais for tourists. Enter Jordan (Elisabeth Shue), who, doesn’t want a drink, but rather wants help with a friend of hers who drank too much and needs medical attention. Thankfully Brian is capable of providing such medical attention despite having no training. Shortly after that meaningless exchange, Doug comes back. Yay! In this section of the film, Doug’s primary goal is to tell as many strangers as possible that he taught Brian, “everything he knows.” He’s since married a woman (not Coral, Gina Gershon never appears again) and they’re basically just hanging out, like everyone else on the beach. Jordan and Brian montage their way into a relationship, featuring an astounding clip of them riding horses by the ocean, and another of Brian tackling Jordan aggressively, suplexing her into the sand, and dunking her into the undertow. They then have sex beneath a waterfall. All of this lasts a weirdly long time, doesn’t feature bartending, everything about business school has been forgotten, all plans for the bar Cocktail and Dreams have been forgotten, everything about the old jobs in New York have been abandoned, all of the ancillary characters from those settings are no longer present, and, during most of the tropics section of the film, there is straight up no conflict. They’re just relaxing, drinking, chatting, and sleeping together in Jamaica. Then Doug bets Brian that he can’t “land a rich chick,” so he promptly woos a nearby well-dressed woman, who I thought looked a little bit like a slightly-older Elisabeth Shue, by using the time-tested method of: making her a drink she didn’t ask for and flinging a burning match in her direction. “He’s a master with the ladies,” emotionally disturbed Doug will say later.
Everyone moves back to New York. I can’t explain it any better than that. Everyone moves back to New York, apparently done with their jobs and vacationing in paradise, marking the beginning of the meatiest section of the film. This is when things become weird. Brian gets into another fight, this time with some sculptor that knows the “rich chick” that he had sex with. They’re living together now, even though he only had sex with her because he wanted to win a trivial amount of money from Doug. After the fight, Brian dumps that girl and stalks Jordan. He shows up to her apartment and they have a conversation that has to be among the most amazing arguments between a movie couple ever. Brian is stunningly honest regarding the reason for his infidelity. “Look, when a dude dares you, you’ve got to do it!” There are lots of paintings in the background. And a pair of skis. Jordan tells Brian she’s pregnant. He has a reaction that is somehow not supportive, not shocked, not happy, not angry, not scared. It’s like his brain was chewing on the information for a while and then spat up mush instead of swallowing it down. He goes back to his uncle for a pep talk. The uncle gives him the advice “you’ve got a real problem.” Brian tracks Jordan to her parents house only to find out that she’s a “rich chick” too. He waltzes into their apartment and has a conversation with her dad. The man hates Brian for betraying and impregnating his daughter, so he tries to give him a gift of $10,000. Brian declines. Jordan tells him to leave. He does so.
Re-enter Doug. Doug is now incredibly successful, owning a very popular bar and having enough money to have a sailboat docked in New York Harbor. When Brian meets up with him, they share a bottle of Remy Martin that’s very expensive. Then Doug’s wife asks Brian to take her home, he does, she tries to have sex with him, he declines that offer after a little making out, and returns to Doug on the sailboat. And Doug is dead. I mean - he’s just dead, man. It isn’t like he accidentally drank himself into oblivion either. He killed himself by slitting his own throat and bleeding out all over his cabin’s table. Doug sends Brian a note from the beyond that’s largely about nothing.
Side note: how often do you think people kill themselves after actually drinking some Louie XIII Remy Martin? It’s like $3000 a bottle, so do people only decide to crack that baby open if they’re only planning on living for another twenty minutes or so? Is this something the company’s PR department has to deal with regularly? It’s like Captain Morgan’s “Got a little Captain in you?” except it’s “Remy Martin - it’ll make you wish you were dead. Literally.”
So in the final act of Cocktail theater, Brian tells Jordan that Doug savaged his own neck with a crystal bottle and that he found his glossy-eyed corpse in a sailboat before police asked him some very difficult questions (not depicted). That does the trick. Now she loves him. They leave her father. He opens up a bar called Flanagan’s Cocktails and Dreams as a nice F-You to dead Doug, who never gets to see his name in pink neon, and Jordan tells Brian that she’s actually pregnant with twins. It feels a little bit like Full House at this point. Brian delivers the film’s third and final poem. And we’re out.
I would say that Cocktail could only have been written by a drug-addled Hollywood writer who wrote it one scene at a time, once a month, every month, for forty months, forgetting the previous scene each and every time, but that can’t be because it’s so rooted in 80’s ideology that it really only could have been produced exactly in 1988. So I have no explanation. The constant about-facing makes it absolutely worth watching, even though you are not going to be delivered anything close to the product the broad title promises and you’re not going to be delivered any competent story. Come to think of it, the only experience I can really compare it to is listening to a drunk guy at a bar tell a story that is all over the place. It goes on tangents, it picks up and drops characters without any regard for their roles or importance, the content is varying degrees of horrifying even though it’s all delivered in a loud slurred monotone, and though nothing in particular is too shocking, you’re bound to walk away feeling different.