Feb 3

Feb 3 Classic Movie Review : Cocktail (1988)

Kids are drinking less than we did. Than we still do, I should say. It might come as a surprise to some and as some kind of generational gap issue to others, but the reasons behind their more health conscious choices are more simple than we think. Alcohol is portrayed as a lot more destructive and a lot less cool than it was back then. For example, they never had a movie about a philandering bartender who also happened to be the coolest guy in New York.

It’s hard to believe that film existed, but Cocktail existed and it generated close to 200 million dollars at the box office in 1988. It would be about 453 millions today. Wildly successful numbers in any era.

Cocktail tells the story of Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise), a veteran turned bartender after being turned away from just about any job on Wall Street for not having a college degree. His boss Doug Coughlin (eighties wonder Bryan Brown) is somewhat of a philosopher and teaches him the dark arts of making a spectacle behind the bar. The pair quickly conquers New York even if they’re taking forever to make one cocktail until Coughlin gets jealous of his protégé.

The Triumph of the Self-Taught Entrepreneur

This is a movie about creating your own place in the world. Not finding, but creating. Because American filmmakers believe in taking what’s yours and not being granted an opportunity by some benevolent corporate figure. At the beginning of Cocktail, Brian is getting laughed out of countless offices by faceless, soulless suits looking at the qualifications more than they look at the person. He becomes a barman because he’s rejected from daytime American culture.

Which is ironic because almost overnight, Brian goes from not competent enough to serve coffee in an office, to the talk of the town and somewhat of a godlike figure for the aforementioned suits. He’s suddenly got something that people want. Not quite a mind to create divine cocktails, but an iconic showmanship behind the bar. Which is doubly ironic because Brian and Doug’s act requires two people and five fucking minutes to make a single drink.

But Cocktail being set inside a fantasy world where booze and spectacle are the two most necessary variables to someone’s happiness, so it doesn’t really matter. A good decade before Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk were even a thing, Roger Donaldson’s movie already idealized disruptive and iconoclast entrepreneurship and disregard for the institutions. Brian carves his place in the New York nightlife out of nothing. Because he’s handsome, charismatic and because he can.

The Quiet Charms of Discreetly Unhinged Movies

I had only ever watched fragments of Cocktail before this viewing. Mostly the part where he’s in Jamaica, where he gets laid and calls people "mon" a lot. It was a mere afterthought in my personal culture, but I do love to watch ridiculous eighties movies to relax and Cocktail more than qualified for the endeavor. It’s some kind of twisted Tom Cruise fantasy where having smashing good looks, a killer smile (or just being Tom Cruise) can get you everything.

I mean, he’s so irresistible that his partner needs to sleep with his girlfriend off screen, out of nowhere, in order to provide a little bit of conflict to the first half of the movie and send him packing to Jamaica. Doug is never portrayed as duplicitous or even jealous of Brian ever again in the movie. He’s just an irresponsible alcoholic with an ironically philandering wife. He basically exists to give Brian emotional depth, but it works!

The lessons from Cocktail are so scummy and irresponsible, it makes the movie way more fun than it ought to be: bad friends make life interesting, women make it worth living, money makes you someone and while you can temporarily renounce any of these three, you can’t even lose it. If you do, you can never be whole again. While these should never be applied to real life, they’re so disconnected from common sense, they create this weird paradigm for the film to thrive in.

Seriously, you should watch Cocktail over the holidays. It’s a license to get away from your responsibilities and feel alright at being capitalist scum in a controlled environment. Entrepreneurial scumbags have rarely been portrayed as positively as they were in this movie, but they’re too disconnected from reality to ever inspire someone. No one wants to become a semi-deadbeat, showboating bar douchebag anymore.

It’s supposed to be something you are in college, not make it your own personality. The kids have all understood that, but you can get a sample of that life from this movie.