The first thing to understand about a film like Cocaine Bear (aside from how the title is one of those notions that just gets stuck in your head the moment you even hear it) is that it's one of those movies that always comes with a "Based (however loosely) on a True Story" moniker attached to it in the credits. The real punchline seems to be how the film's director, Elizabeth Banks, is still able to use that phrase with a relatively straight face. It turns out there is a kernel of fact tucked away within the folds of the otherwise complete fantasy that Banks has to spin for her audience. It's one of those minor anecdotes of history which are so unbelievable that's it's almost bemusing just to realize it was something that happened. That's why I think it's best to get the history out of the way first, as it helps give us a factual starting point for understanding the basic story Banks has to tell. We'll begin, in other words, with the facts as real life presents them, before letting the fairy tale assume the narrative control.
In real life, the whole thing seems to have begun with a face in the crowd. The name that belonged to it was Andrew C. Thornton II. Here's a guy who would otherwise have never stuck out in any notable way in life if it hadn't been for all the choices he made throughout his career. He was just some nothing kid from Bourbon, Kentucky. His parent's owned their own horse breeding farm, might have been local community pillars, the usual sort of thing, you know? They send their kid to a good private education school, complete with a Polo Club. He later graduates to military academy and lasts one semester there before dropping out to join the army. He winds up at Fort Bragg, where Thornton trained as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. It was there that our young instigator learned he had a kind of natural talent for chute jumping. He got to be so good at it that he was later allowed to participate in the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic. In retrospect, maybe that's where everything started to go wrong. The mid 60s was a time when a lot the world's major governments got up to a lot of skeevy activities behind the scenes. The basic idea is that everyone kept up a false front of being at odds in public, while all sharing more or less the same bed in private, and places like Santo Domingo were no exception. They never made the same headlines as Vietnam, yet they kept their hand in the games.
That seems to be true as far as a bare surface description of the subject's actions go. The problem is it doesn't give a good idea of what the whole picture seems to be. Like, for instance, what's the first thing Thornton does once he puts on the badge? He somehow gets himself assigned to the the county's Drug Enforcement division. Not long after, he's busted for smuggling. What does that tell you? To me, none of this sounds like accident or happenstance. It all just sends out alarm bells, with the phrase "Fast One" blaring in red neon letters. Everything here tells me that it's perhaps a mistake to claim that what we've got on our hands is the simple case of a good cop and former soldier boy gone bad. I think everything was a bit more arranged than that. Whatever career Thornton might have planned for himself, he emerged out of the Dominicans a bonafide "Made Man" for the drug traffic trade, and his getting into the Narcotics division of the Kentucky police force was just Andy obeying his orders. In other words, the most likely scenario is that he was always placed their in order to help speed up the trafficking of all the real heavy stuff into the veins of the American mainstream. All it ever amounted to was little more than a case of dirty deeds and done dirt cheap, and Andy was in the middle of it all.
He got busted eventually, as you might expect, and when he finally got out of the slammer, his handlers seemed to have realized he'd be more useful working the "trade routes" rather than being stationed higher up the ladder where the walls had more ears than anyone was comfortable with. So Thornton spent his remaining time as what might be termed a "company courier" sending cocaine across the country. It was during one fateful run in 1977 that really kicked off the story proper. Thornton and another accomplice were transporting a supply of Colombian White to a rendezvous point that was further down the line. At an earlier point, somewhere between Blairsville, Georgia and Knoxville, Tennessee, Thornton and his accomplice discovered the weight of their cargo had overloaded the plane. The freight was so much that even if they unloaded some of the "merchandise", there would still be nothing they could do to keep themselves from falling out of the sky. There was nothing to try except tossing a goodish number of traveler's duffel bags full of cocaine out the window, and then following after on parachute. I've been unable to find out what happened to Thornton's accomplice.
All I can say for sure is that when it came time for Andy to jump from the plane, one of two possible things happened. The first is that everything went smoothly. He dumped the payload down into the forests of Tennessee, he was geared up for such an emergency situation, and was ready to go, come what may. This smug attitude lasted for all of however long it was from the moment he jumped from the falling plane to the point at which he realized his parachute was defective, and wouldn't open. The other possibility is the one dramatized at the very start of Banks's film, where Thornton succeeds in dumping the payload, yet the moment he makes a run for the exit, the damn fool wrapped his head a good one on the roof of the plane, at the exact moment he decided to pull a Geronimo. The impact of the concussion leaves the poor, dumb sap out stone cold, and that's about all she wrote. Either way, what is certain is this. Andrew Thornton fell to his death on what turned out to be his very last drug run. His entire life became a parable of wasted opportunity and misspent youth. Here is where the troubled young Mr. Thornton exits the story (web) and the really weird part of everything begins.
Like I said, I've been unable to find out whatever happened to Thornton's accomplice. I do know what happened to the payload they both tossed overboard. It wound up scattered to the four corners encompassing an area of the Knoxville wilderness. For the longest time, no one in the local population of the region seemed to have any clue as to what had just transpired way above their heads in the middle of the night. There's also no intrinsic reason why they should have, either. Indeed, it is possible to suggest that the whole affair would remain a kind of quasi-non-event. The historical equivalent of a tree falling in the woods, and no one around to witness it. Perhaps it would have remained like that if someone hadn't stumbled upon the bear. In other words, I guess that old parable about the tree falling turned out to be kind of false in this case. There was someone who found out about the mysterious, missing bags of coke in the woods. The trick of the tale is that it wasn't anyone human. Instead, the first "person" to discover Andy Thornton's coke was a North American Black Bear. And it is precisely at this crucial juncture that the history ends, and the fantasy of Elizabeth Banks and her crew begins.
Conclusion: The Best Richard Bachman Story That Was Never Written.
Even those figures who are ostensibly meant to be the bad guys, such as Liotta and his posse are treated with the same general sense of big-hearted generosity that is able to give the characters a crucial layers of extra added depth. This is a particularly notable feature, as while Liotta and a handful of kids (Brooklyn Prince, Christian Convery) and their mother (Keri Russell) are the story's main focus, there are plenty of moments dedicated to the antics of a lot of other individuals that dot the landscape. This extends to folks like Margo Martindale's Ranger Liz and her bumbling assistant, Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), to a pair of paramedics (Scott Seiss and Kahyun Kim) who somehow manage to leave a pretty good impact, despite showing up for just one sequence of the story. Each of these characters is able to add to the overall sense of purpose that's driving the plot, even though just a handful of them are ever the film's main focus. It makes me wonder if Elizabeth Banks might be a fan of movies like Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad World (1963). That's another film centered around an expansive cast of players whose exploits all revolve around a carefully hidden stash of items. Banks' story is a lot less ambitious than Kramer's, who was able to assemble a cast of literal thousands to help stage a parable of human greed and stupidity. Banks limits her scope to just three main groups, while much like her earlier counterpart, she makes sure the proceedings are handled with tongue firmly in cheek.
Indeed, the notable aspect of the film is how it is able to deftly handle its delicate balance of both humor and horror. This is the other major component to the story. In many ways, Cocaine Bear deserves to join the ranks of a specific type modern Gothic cinema, that of the sub-category known as "Nature Run Amok". This is the type of narrative that owes its existence to the breakout performance of Steven Spielberg's Jaws. It's the kind of story featuring a cast of wildlife chow that's basically turned loose in an imaginary room with a predator, and the audience is left to see who gets to make it out alive. If the 1975 adaptation of a now obscure Peter Benchley novel had never turned into the first Summer blockbuster, then it's an open question of if we would have ever had similar films of this kind, such as Joe Dante's Piranha (1978), Lake Placid (1999), or Deep Blue Sea (ibid). All of these films take place on or adjacent to the ocean, though there have been examples in the past which are situated on dry land. Cocaine Bear is just the latest in a long line of such films, yet it may also wind up as the most well regarded land predator of the species. What we have then is a very specific hybrid style film.
Perhaps the biggest strength of the script is that it allows Banks to include a crucial ingredient that makes all the difference between a passable mediocrity, and fairly decent entertainment that's probably worth the occasional re-watch. The writing is able to sketch out its two to four main leads in a way that finds all the best possible ways of making you care about them. Screenwriter Jimmy Warden seems to have realized that the actual heart of the film never quite rests with its setup, or if it does, then something extra is needed to make sure the story sticks in your mind after you've left the theater. He appears to have been smart enough to realize a movie like this can't survive on schlock alone. Rather, let's say that all the best schlock has to have some sort of extra weight to it, so that you've been given a memorable experience at the same time as you're probably laughing your ass off. In order to do that, the filmmakers need to find out whatever that extra quality is that helps elevate the material above just another hack work cash-in. This was something guys like Corman excelled at, and why his work is still remembered to this day. In the case of Banks and Warden, the solution to their problem comes from two intertwined components. The first is the aforementioned big-hearted atmosphere that Banks works so well at grounding her characters in. The second is that she let's the film have real stakes.
It's true that the vast majority of the film consists of the title character stumbling across random hikers and disemboweling them in a lot of hilarious ways. It's the film's major selling point, yet it's not it's ultimate focus. Like I said, Bank's skill behind the camera, and Warden's gift with the pen is that they each are able to find and maintain the proper sense of balance between Horror and Comedy. Everything starts out on a very humorous note with Thornton and the failed drop. This comedic tone keeps up as we meet our first group of Bear chow (Elsa and Olaf, respectively, which gives you an idea of the kind of light-hearted tone the film opens with) and proceeds to keep with this style as we move first from one secondary character to the next, until we reach the point where we are left following Russell and Liotta as they make their way through the forest toward their respective goal (the cocaine for Ray, the children for Russell). The crucial thing that happens is so imperceptible that sometimes the audience might not notice the tonal shift until later in the third act of the film. This is because Banks is able to play with the movies tone in a way that calls to mind the more subtle approaches of John Carpenter.
It starts out with a few shenanigans, in which the characters prove they wouldn't be out of place in a Preston Sturges film, and then the Bear jumps them from behind, and its as if someone spliced one of the shark attacks from Spielberg's film in with a Loony Tunes skit. It's a delicate balance, and yet the writing sells it. Your able to laugh when one of the characters says or does something in what's clearly a comedic fashion, and then the everything transitions to Horror the minute the Bear turns around and begins to maul and reduce them to a red pulp up a tree. It's gone from a situation of authentic humor to one that's genuinely horrific in just a few short beats. This is the dichotomy the film maintains throughout its runtime, and once more, the best way to describe it all is a very fine balancing act.
Banks has the difficult job of keeping these two plates spinning the entire time without ever once letting either one drop. She has to maintain this dual tonal stance while at the same time making sure the story that's generating these elements remains entertaining. The fact that she's able to maintain this precarious tonal stability from the opening all the way to the closing shot amounts to an open display of talent that is both surprising and gratifying by equal tuns. What helps is that you don't see it coming.
This is the real reason why I almost want to label the film as a hybrid. If that's the case though, then the irony is how (for me at least) it's also a very familiar mixed breed. What I'm about say next is the kind of thing that's only going to make sense if you're the kind of book person who's also a fan of Stephen King. Because believe it or not, what this film winds up doing is reminding me of some of his work. Specifically, it's like watching the kind story that King used to sometimes write under the fictional name of "Richard Bachman". He was a pseudonym that the reigning Monarch of Frights used to employ for a time in order to see if people were buying his books because of the stories, or else just because it was his name on the cover. The result was a series of book with a familiar enough sounding tone for those who are Constant Readers of King's works. The major notable factor about the Bachman books is that there was always this off-kilter, slightly skewed angle to them. Here's what I mean, and I swear I'll explain how a bunch of long ago novels ties into a film of a Bear that's high on cocaine.
What Banks's film seems to have in common with the novels King published under the Bachman pseudonym is this same shared skewed outlook, or narrative tone, which determines the look and feel of their secondary worlds. I think King is the one who was able to describe this literary atmospheric vibe, and the mindset that it was an expression of, way back in 1996. That's when the author felt compelled to explain what "Richard Bachman Frame of Mind" amounts to in terms of artistic expression. He did this in an essay entitled The Importance of Being Bachman. It's there he describes the contents of this mind set as "low rage and simmering despair". Those are simple enough concepts to grasp, I suppose. The trouble is that (aside from creating the kind of artistic vibe that's sure to alienate and turn away most of the audience) it doesn't really get to the heart of things. Besides, if rage was the only element to the Bachman novels, then they still wouldn't have a shelf life after all these years. Perhaps King does a better job of describing the "Bachman" mind frame when he talks about how he came to write one of his first fully completed novels. It had the simple title of Rage and can be read as a kind of non-supernatural precursor to later books such as Carrie and Christine. At the same time, it also reads like an eerily uncanny blue print for the kind of gun violence incidents we're living through today.
"The good folks mostly win, courage usually triumphs over fear, the family dog hardly ever contracts rabies; these are things I knew at twenty - five, and things I still know now, at the age (almost) of 25 x 2. But I know something else as well: there's a place in most of us where rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are full of monsters. It is good to have a voice in which the terrors of such a place can be articulated and its geography partially described, without denying the sunshine and clarity that fill so much of our ordinary lives. For me, Bachman is that voice...Bachman had become a kind of id for me; he said the things I couldn't, and the thought of him out there on his New Hampshire dairy farm - not a best-selling writer who gets his name in some stupid Forbes list of entertainers too rich for their own good, of his face on the Today show or doing cameos in movies - quietly writing his books, gave him leave to think in ways I could not think and speak in ways I could not speak (ibid)". Finally, King helps us out by providing as neat a summation of all of this as we are ever likely to get. He does this by citing the inspiration he got from a fellow ink stained wretch.
"In the first draft of The Dark Half, I had Thad Beaumont quote Donald E. Westlake, a very funny writer who has penned a series of very grim crime novels under the name Richard Stark. Once asked to explain the dichotomy between Westlake and Stark, Westlake said "I write Westlake stories on sunny days. When it rains. I'm Stark." I don't think that made it into the final version of The Dark Half, but I have always loved it (and related to it, as it has become fashionable to say). Bachman - a fictional creation who became more real to me with each published book which bore his byline - was a rainy - day sort of guy if ever there was one (ibid)". The only reason for bringing all of this seemingly unrelated background material into play here is because it marks the only other way I've found to describe the crazy Jekyll and Hyde tone of Bank's film. Earlier on, I referred to the movie as big-hearted. That's a descriptive label I'm more than willing to stand by. I've also called the picture schizoid, and everything King says about the nature of his "Bachman" writings is the best match or way of describing this film's darker aspects. In that sense, Banks can be said to have made a legitimate Horror Comedy on her hands, one that is equal parts brutal, hilarious, and heart warming by turns.
What's funny about all that is how Warden's script is able to neatly segue from what all intents and purposes is a Martin Scorsese style Mean Streets scenario, and then transition right back into that same, familiar sense of big-heartedness. This makes the film rely on a complex number of tonal shifts that can be tricky to pull off if the writer doesn't know what he's doing, or how to handle characters in situations like this. That Warden and Banks are able to pull this off not once but every time when the script calls for it to happen is one of the most understated demonstrations of talent that I think I've managed to catch in a modern film. All of which is enough to allow me to say this film is easy to recommend. I came into this not totally blind, yet I did know there was going to be enough of a deviation from the facts so that I could never quite guess where the film was going, and that turns out to be a good thing in this case. It's true the film is loosely based on a real event. Andrew Thornton really did fuck up royal during what turned out to be his last drug run, and a forested area of Knoxville did get coated with the magic powder from the skies. More to the point, a bear did in fact really freaking ingest I think like a whole entire bar of the fucking stuff. Let that stand as a level of ridiculousness that real life has supplied the filmmakers with on this one. It's a case of reality being less real than fiction.
Don't ask me why that should be the case, because I'll swear I'm still scratching my head over it. There's not much more to tell as far as real life is concerned. I have no idea if there was ever as crazy and convoluted a search for the missing kilos of Dominican White as portrayed in the film. I do know that the famous ursine in question has gone on to earn itself the nickname of Pablo Eskobear. It's the kind of moniker and situation that sounds like something out of an old 90s rerun of Married with Children, and yet Banks and Warden are able to take everything and give this strange kind of dignity. It's not the kind of film you expect, and yet it manages to win you over with a great deal of success.
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