Raspberry Picking: Cocktail (1988)

Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time, we’re looking at Cocktail, nominee for four Razzies and winner of two, including the 1989 Razzie for Worst Picture.

In the realm of Razzie Award winners for Worst Picture, the story of Roger Donaldson’s Cocktail is downright pedestrian. Here’s the TL;DR version: a guy wrote a well-regarded book and a screenplay based on said book. A little studio called “Disney” and a big star wanted in, but only if the author/screenwriter made A Few Small Changes. And the author/screenwriter learned a valuable lesson about giving an inch and taking a mile.

That author/screenwriter is Heywood Gould, who tended bar for twelve years to support his writing career. His semi-autobiographical 1984 novel Cocktail, a complex and darkly comic story of men with big dreams defeated by bigger bar tabs, was a hit with critics and audiences, including bartenders. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the original version of Gould’s screenplay would have been much closer to his novel; one of the movie’s two stars, Bryan Brown of F/X fame, described it as “one of the very best screenplays I ever read.”

But movies need money to get made, and the secret ingredient that got people to pay for this Cocktail was Tom Cruise, who wanted to play the lead. (I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m not actually going to fill this with terrible cocktail jokes, I promise.)

As soon as Cruise signed on, the notes began to appear in the margins. The main character had to be younger. He had to be more hopeful and idealistic, he had to have a beautiful love interest, he had to have a happy ending. 

Here our story diverges from the typical Making of a Razzie Winner. Despite the instant flood of disdain from both movie critics and bartenders, Cocktail was a huge hit, bringing in $78 million domestic and an additional $93 million worldwide against its $20 million budget. Cruise, who also starred in the 1989 Best Picture winner Rain Man, continued his rocketlike rise to stardom. If the film had a victim, it was Gould, who was deeply hurt by the intense criticism of both the film and his screenplay, and whose career as a screenwriter fizzled out over the course of the ‘90s. But even Gould turned out all right. He’s still a respected writer. He harbors no bitterness towards his critics, thanking them for toughening him up, nor towards the meddlers in his story, claiming they did what they had to do for Hollywood.

So Cocktail has, at worst, a not-unhappy ending for just about everyone involved. But the movie still won the 1989 Razzie Award for Worst Picture – beating out the likes of Caddyshack II and Mac and Me – and netted Gould the dishonor for Worst Screenplay. It has not exactly received a critical reappraisal, but it lives on in the public memory less as one of the worst movies of all time than as a dumb-but-harmless fluffy rom-com where Tom Cruise does some neat tricks with liquor bottles.  So did it deserve the disdain of its time?  Does it deserve another chance now?

…eh.

THE STORY

Cocktail opens with a banger of a credits song (“Oh, I Love You So” by Preston Smith) over a dreary country landscape that sure does set some kind of tone for the movie, until Tom Cruise and his carful of unnamed friends show up thirty seconds later and set a completely different tone for it. Neither of these tones will turn out to be accurate.

Cruise plays Brian Flanagan, a cocky wiseass fresh off a tour of duty, who is headed to the Big Apple in pursuit of some impressively nonspecific dreams about doing something big and getting rich. Maybe he’s going to Wall Street. Maybe he’s inventing something. Maybe he’s opening a business. He doesn’t know. All he knows is that he has Dreams, and the secret to realizing them is somewhere in New York City, where his Uncle Pat (Ron Dean) owns a successful bar.

Brian enrolls in business school and tries and fails to wow a diverse collection of Wall Street bigwigs with his big ideas and winning smile in a montage of overlit close-ups that might make you feel like you’ve had too much to drink. Demoralized, he sets his sights lower, and eventually ends up in the seedy cocktail bar where Doug Coughlin (Brown) rules the roost. Coughlin is the barman-philosopher to a T, spouting worldly maxims that he calls “Coughlin’s Laws” like “drink or be gone” and “never tell tales about a woman; no matter how far away she is, she’ll hear you” in Brown’s Australian accent. Coughlin takes a liking to Flanagan and takes him on for the evening shift, which Flanagan royally screws up. He sees Something Special in Flanagan, though, so he keeps Flanagan as a bartending padawan, teaching him how to do it the cool bottle-flippy way.

And then pretty much goddamn instantly, Flanagan becomes a master flair bartender, the best one Coughlin has ever seen, because we’ve got a schedule to keep around here.

Flanagan and Coughlin start making plans to go into business together, but a rift comes between them when Coughlin puts the moves on Flanagan’s new girlfriend Coral (Gina Gershon). We then shift to Jamaica two years later, where Flanagan runs a tiki bar and begins tentative flirtations with a cute tourist named Jordan Mooney (Elisabeth Shue). But then Coughlin wanders back into Flanagan’s bar and life, bringing all sorts of potentially interesting complications that never really get developed or explored as he does.

THE BAD

First, since I believe in wearing my biases and shortcomings proudly on my sleeves, let me admit up front that Cocktail was never going to wow me, even if it turned out to be a misunderstood classic. I think the audience for this movie is supposed to be bartenders and clientele at posh cocktail bars. I know that it’s not supposed to be me. Cocktail is a movie that revolves around two things I don’t really get: Tom Cruise and bars. My approach to drinking is to order a beer, drink it, and then maybe order another one. As for Cruise, I don’t dislike most of his performances, but he strikes me as one of those actors who got really, really good at playing an exaggerated version of himself, and the more I see of that character, the less I want to see more of him.

So I’m not going to pull a Roger Ebert and try to evaluate the accuracy of Cocktail’s bartending, because I don’t know enough to do so. I also don’t care. I do care whether it makes bartending look visually compelling, and, well…

Cocktail wants to be a highlight movie about the barman as performance artist, and it also wants to be a romantic dramedy. Those are two perfectly respectable, if not earth-shaking, things to be. It’s not terribly good at being either of them.

Cocktail’s explicitly stated goal for the audience is that we view bartending, at least for the duration of the movie, as a craft. Consider for a moment the kinds of things you might do, as a filmmaker, if you wanted to call attention to the finer points of a craft. You would go out of your way to make the craft – be it painting, playing the piano, writing, computer programming, or rolling joints – appear as cinematic as possible. If the craft involves impressive acrobatic or other physical feats, you would go out of your way to highlight that physicality and make it look more acrobatic, more physical, more artistic than it really is. You would do what Raging Bull does for boxing or The Wrestler does for pro wrestling or Shaolin Soccer does for whatever magical lunacy is happening all over that film.

Instead, Cocktail contents itself with endless dimly-lit medium and medium wide shots of Flanagan, or sometimes Flanagan and Coughlin, doing variations on the same bottle-flipping trick for what feels like hours while their customers whoop and holler like they just witnessed Christ healing the sick.

Seriously, this is what everyone got so excited over? This is why, according to Heywood Gould, bartenders got pissed at him because their customers kept demanding they do it like Tom Cruise? Cocktail is somehow convinced that performing this trick over and over and over and over and over and over and over makes Brian Flanagan look suave and sexy and not like the world’s saddest low-budget circus performer. Ironically for a film that is in part about the development of a persona, Cocktail suffers from a pronounced lack of style.

As for Cruise’s actual performance, it’s…fine, I guess? He’s playing a character literally created for him, and that character is the same dreamy loverboy disguised as an arrogant twerp that we know and…well, know…from a thousand other forgettable rom-coms. He is very convincing as the arrogant twerp and neither convincing nor interesting as the dreamy loverboy, doing nothing to brighten the syrupy-sticky doldrums of the film’s second and third acts.

And Lord are those second and third acts dreary. Had Cocktail simply stuck to developing the relationship between Flanagan and Coughlin, the movie might have retained some of the original screenplay’s fabled power and become, at least, an affecting story of male friendship, rivalry, and showy machismo. Instead, after the two men have their contrived falling-out and we head to Jamaica, the majority of the rest of its run time is given over to Flanagan’s courtship of Jordan Mooney, which is about as interesting as watching guppies swim back and forth in a bowl. Coughlin comes back into Flanagan’s life, of course, but he remains firmly on the sidelines, only showing up when he’s needed to shove Flanagan into a new realization about life and the universe.

The movie is also, in the fine tradition of Reagan-Bush-era Greed Isn’t Good Actually movies, utterly without a brain in its depiction of Wall Street culture and yuppie materialism. It was never going to be Cocktail, but would it kill anyone in the 1980s to try saying something interesting about the pursuit of entrepreneurial glory? Yes, Hollywood, we know – if you focus too much on making money, you’ll lose sight of what really matters in life. Let’s have the filmmakers here repeat that a few more times and maybe it will even get through their thick skulls.

THE GOOD

Of course, every Razzie story has its heroes, and someone is always around to give the bad movie more than it deserves.

I’ve been tossing around an idea in my head since I started writing Raspberry Picking that there ought to be some joke awards that celebrate undeserved great performances in crappy movies. By far the element of Cocktail that has garnered the most praise has been Bryan Brown’s performance as Coughlin, and I’m going to be deeply unoriginal here and affirm that he is, in fact, the best thing in the movie. In Coughlin – a cheerily charming and profoundly self-loathing man who is not-so-secretly terrified of life on the other side of his bar – we see the clearest vestiges of Gould’s original novel. Brown has mastered the smile that never quite reaches his eyes, and adds subtle layers of desperation every time Coughlin insists that he “taught [Flanagan] everything he knows.” When he arrives at the tragic end of his story, it’s predictable in a good way – not “yeah, I saw that coming from a mile away,” but “yeah…I saw that coming from a mile away.”

The long-suffering ladies of the cast deserve a mention here too. Elisabeth Shue works hard to bring neighbor-girl sweetness and charm to her pathetic little nothing of a role. She’s successful enough – and I do mean this as a compliment – that I spent about three nanoseconds being caught off guard when The Big Reveal dropped that she’s the daughter of one of the richest businessmen (Laurence Luckinbill, also in a thankless role) in New York. Kelly Lynch, as Coughlin’s young and unfulfilled wife-object Kerry, also conveys shadows of the darker and more insightful movie that might have been.

Cruddy lighting aside, Cocktail tells the closest thing it can fathom to an interesting story in Mel Bourne’s production design. I’m especially fond of Mr. Mooney’s stuffy lavender apartment in a snooty Park Avenue high-rise, with its combination of aggressively tasteful upholstery and hideous geometric modern art. The bars are set up like stages in a very intimate, claustrophobic theater, keeping Flanagan and Coughlin carefully separated from the throng of patrons and just a little too close to each other. And of course, we must acknowledge costume designer Ellen Mirojnick, who keeps Tom Cruise decked out in a delicious smorgasbord of goofy tropical button-down shirts.

So, at the end of the day…I guess it’s not awful? I have seen (courtesy of my dear friends at Alternate Ending) the brain-melting pile of Sumatran rat monkey feces that is Mac and Me, so I know for a fact that Cocktail was not the worst movie of 1988. I’m not sure it’s any sort of superlative of anything. In fact, I’m not sure why anyone still cares about it, or why anyone would bother making some dumb joke about it to a bartender. It’s like those pieces of government-sponsored modern art that get commissioned for displays in airports: I guess I understand why this got made, but I don’t terribly want to spend two hours looking at it ever again.

Quality of Movie: 2½ / 5. Bland ‘80s cheese that could have been more. Nothing here is any less than serviceable, and nothing is any more than that either.

Quality of Experience: 2 / 5. Unless you’re a bartender watching this with other bartenders to make fun of Tom Cruise, Cocktail has no bad movie, or good movie, bona fides.

Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida.  She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects.  You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog!