INDEX	August 15, 2022
American Made
American Made is a film about the Iran Contra scandal, though clearly it is fiction rather than a documentary. Tom Cruise plays a drug smuggler who operates on a level that makes Al Capone look like an amateur. He is also single handedly thwarting the will of Congress (who not unreasonably did not want to be dragged into a Vietnam style war in Latin America). Yet God Bless America, he loves his country. And you can see why. America, in the shape of Olly North and the CIA, have given him unbelievable opportunites and boundless wealth. The fact that he continues to live a suburban lifestyle, despite having his own personal bank vault, tells you more about the American education system than you really want to know. All this could happen because Ronald Reagan was president and it appears his world view was formed by the Westerns he either watched or appeared in; so long as America was fighting the Commies they wore the white hats and were the good guys. That meant that this extraordinary crime spree, set up, enabled and sustained by CIA, was not a crime. Except it was. I know nothing about cocaine but my guess is that many thousands of lives were destroyed by the CIA enabling the smuggling of vast quantities of the white powder into the USA. Then there was the illegal immigrants smuggled in as part of the operation. Finally, of course, the money that financed the operations of drug cartels and terrorists in Latin America. Is it fact, fiction or faction? Director Doug Liman is better known for his action films than documentaries. It seems like a true story to me, but in the world of smoke and mirrors it's always hard to be sure.
INDEX Jonathan Brind		August 15, 2022