The Risky Business of Drinks and Money

A Contemporary History Approach to Cocktail (1988)

Poster for Cocktail (1988) via IMDb

Cocktail (1988) – Contemporary History

The other day, I got married and then had the most outrageous cocktail of my life. It was an Old Bay Bloody Mary with olives, celery, citrus, and shrimp on the side – an actual shrimp cocktail (pictured). Wild. So naturally, I’ve been thinking about that all week and the guy I made some lifelong promises to before inhaling the ultimate shrimp cocktail suggested I review Roger Donaldson’s Cocktail (1988) to commemorate the most important thing that happened last weekend. The Review Roulette wheel landed on Contemporary History as our lens, so let’s shake up a Cosmopolitan, throw on some aviators, and gaze into the incomparable shine of a young Tom Cruise in his element: proving his star quality behind and on a bar.

The cocktail in question.

Fresh from a Cold War army enlistment (and harkening back to his Top Gun fame), Brian Flanagan (Cruise) is ready to make his first million on Wall Street. However, much like I wrote about the portrayal of veterans returning home in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, time spent in the military is depicted as a very real hindrance to finding a job back home. Brian, who is obsessed with books on success with titles such as How to Turn Your Idea into a Million Dollars, is eager to get into stocks and sales but without a university education, his self-taught business acumen is laughed out of every interview (teeing up a banger of a response: Cruise - "I'm willing to start at the bottom.” Interviewer - "You're aiming too high"). Fatefully, Brian sees a sign hiring for a new bartender, meets his mentor Doug Coughlin (Bryan Brown), attends business school during the day, and becomes a star of the bar at night. In very on the nose scenes like of him literally juggling an empty bottle of vodka practicing his showmanship while trying to study for an exam, Brian struggles to keep up this dual life and embraces the one in which he finds more personal success, despite feeling as though he is leading himself amiss (but never really seeing that Coughlin is the one with the leash).

Because we’re looking at contemporary history, I want to focus on the moneyed angle of the film by drawing a comparison with a contemporary film also depicting the late 80s moment. Cocktail was released only a year after Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) starring Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox, and Martin Sheen as Carl Fox, Bud’s dad. For those unfamiliar, it’s a very similar film in structure – an ambitious, naïve young person wants to make it big in a business that has the potential to corrupt said naïveté, is led by a mentor into compromising personal and professional situations, and finds morals along the way that correct their path. Ultimately, however, in Wall Street the ending is about justice and casts a very dark light on the stock traders in their Art Deco towers with a strict condemnation of capital crimes. Cocktail has a similar condemnation in the downfall of one character whose ineptitudes with fiscal matters disrupt the aesthetics of wealth surrounding them, but Brian evades these issues and finds his own success actively choosing his future without listening to mentors or father figures or get-rich-quick schemes in dog-eared success manuals.

Cocktail and Wall Street both show their leads and mentors with the stereotypical trappings of late 80s moneyed men, raking in cash, sleeping with beautiful women, abusing substances, working their charms in flashy night clubs, all the hallmarks of a young person carried away by the false promises of money. After this indulgence in the aesthetic idea of success, each film questions what success might look like morally for the characters and personally. While Wall Street leans into that more realistic (but still fantastic) idea of justice for crimes committed, Cocktail moves in this other direction towards fulfilling a more romantic fairy tale for Brian and his love interest Jordan (Elisabeth Shue). Both do challenge definitions of success though and prompt not only their stars but also their audiences to question the value of the pursuit of wealth outside of the aesthetics portrayed when the outward identity of those pursuing it jeopardises their true selves and true happinesses in the process.

As for a contemporary history of its star, as a Tom Cruise film fairly early in a stretch of what would establish him as a genuine movie star – Risky Business (1983), Top Gun (1986), The Color of Money (1986), Rain Man (1988), Born on the Fourth of July (1989) to name a few from just the 80s alone – Cocktail is not his finest work, but my god is it the one that screams “I am a star”. I had not seen Cocktail before today, and admittedly I didn’t really see the charisma of Tom Cruise, but his role here is to be as charismatic as possible to make money, and I now understand why he has the place in our culture that he does. Tom Cruise reinvented the movie star in the late 80s and that has never been clearer to me than in Cocktail. Also, Timothee Chalamet makes more sense to me now too. He’s a little Tom Cruise with the same face structure and gestures and everything.

I really enjoyed Cocktail as a fairy tale set in that fast-paced world of trying to strike it rich as cleverly as possible in the late 80s. Similarly to Wall Street, Cocktail has a real philosophy embedded in it that the get-rich-quick schemers, the manipulators, the ones willing to do bad things for mediocre ends are deeply pained individuals, and it promotes the idea that only a hard work ethic can make even your loftiest dreams come true. It challenges that stocks and bonds and capital B Business mentality of the yuppies so exaggerated on screens and in real life, mocks their shallow desires, and leaves our hero a star anyway with a new measure of success being everything his heart could want, not unlike my ultimate shrimp cocktail.

---

Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am

Gender

Not unlike I wrote in last week’s review on She’s the One (1996), I really enjoyed the different portrayals of masculinity in this film. I thought it was interesting to have the most meaningful relationship in the film be between Brian and his mentor Coughlin and the bad advice an older man imparts on a younger one. The two have a tender relationship and while Coughlin is largely a negative influence on Brian’s behaviour, their friendship is a powerfully positive one as Brian tries to figure out who he is, what he wants, and how to get it after eventually finding the willpower to disregard Coughlin’s advice when warranted.