American Dreamz

American Dreamz

“American Dreamz” is not a satire, but a comedy. Paul Weitz, the writer-director of the film said to Variety: “Satire is what closes on Saturday night. So it’s a comedy.” Really, it’s a satire. Its comedy is just moderately funny, but its satire is cruel and leans towards being vicious. The movie is messier than polished, more spontaneous than calculated, and it takes potshots. I liked its savage sloppiness.

The film goes after two targets: “American Idol” and President Bush (not necessarily in that order). It opens with Martin Tweed (Hugh Grant), TV producer and star of the #1 show on American television. On camera he’s Simon Cowell; off camera he’s Machiavelli, plotting for contestants who will get the biggest ratings. This season he will narrow 100 million potential contestants down to three finalists: Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore), a screamingly delirious blond from Ohio; Sholem Glickstein (Adam Busch), a Hasidic Jew rapper; and Omer Obeidi (Sam Golzari), an Iraqi man-child from Orange County who loves show tunes and may actually be a terrorist.

Meanwhile, at the White House well let me put it this way: In one of many scenes that devolve into slapstick surrealism before our eyes, President Staton (Dennis Quaid) awakens after his re-election victory and blurts out the line you’ve seen in all the ads: “I’m gonna read the newspaper!” He asks for The New York Times. “We can get one,” an aide assures him uncertainly. He finds it fascinating.

“Did you know there are three kinds of Iraqistans?” he asks his chief of staff (Willem Dafoe), who bears an uncanny resemblance to Dick Cheney with shaved head and glasses. The president does not go out in public for several weeks, surrounding himself with books and even alarming his staff by reading the left-wing U.K. paper The Guardian. “There are a lot of interesting things in this newspaper!” he marvels.

The plot follows parallel tracks. On the TV program, we see Sally Kendoo (Moore) playing the role of a screamingly delirious young contestant, pushed by her mother (Jennifer Coolidge) and superagent (Seth Meyers) and dumping her boyfriend (Chris Klein) because he’s going nowhere and she’s going up-up-up. As the godlike “American Dreamz” producer and judge, Hugh Grant does what he’s curiously good at, playing an enormously likable SOB.

When the president finally emerges from his bedroom in the White House having been blasted out by an unfortunate combination of bodily gases his chief of staff begins to manipulate him through every public appearance using a wireless earpiece that allows him to dictate, word for word, Staton’s response to every situation; that many Americans believe Bush has used such earpieces brings a certain poignancy to these scenes.

The First Lady (Marcia Gay Harden), laboring behind the scenes to counsel and advise him (“You could read ‘Hamlet,’ sir it might help you understand Belgium”), suggests that it may be time for him to emerge into public life again. Badgered by publicity over his “reclusive” chief executive, the chief of staff decides to book Staton on the season finale of “American Dreamz” as a guest judge, surrounded by smiling children; although Omer seems destined for the final three or four rounds at least, his handlers decide now would be a great time for him to wear a bomb into the studio.

This is a black comedy in the vein of “Dr. Strangelove,” a film that dared to think the unthinkable. “American Dreamz” is not as good as “Strangelove,” maybe because it lacks the latter’s pitiless ironic detachment. I was surprised, though, by its audacity at showing us the Bush-like president as a clueless puppet of his staff; “I wanted to show my dad any idiot could do it,” says he and by its frankness. Quaid looks and sounds a little like Bush, and Dafoe looks a lot well, sounds like Cheney; Hugh Grant could be Simon Cowell.

Paul Weitz was 33 when he directed “American Pie.” It looked like a teenage sex comedy, played like one and was but was also other things. He proved with “About a Boy” (2002) that he had directing ability; working with brother Chris (who co-wrote), he adapted Nick Hornby into the perfect setting for Hugh Grant’s merger of selfishness and charm. “In Good Company” (2004), which he wrote and directed, starred Dennis Quaid as an aging executive bossed by a young hotshot who also was dating his daughter.

Now Quaid and Grant are together on another such project with Weitz: rougher than those earlier films in finish or assurance but with more reckless nerve. A sitcom about an idiot president? Yes, but not only that: One who talks about himself in terms of TV ratings? And whose mother wanted him to run for POTUS in order to spite his father? And who tells one of his staffers: “You’re fired”? Why DQ has never been asked to impersonate GWB on “SNL” is one of life’s mysteries.

Does this picture go too far? Is it in bad taste? That depends on what you think satire is supposed to do. Satire (I think) by definition goes beyond the norm, exaggerates, is partisan, is unfair. It offends those who believe others (not themselves) are too stupid to know it’s satire. It alarms those who think some things are not laughing matters. To them I recommend Lord Byron: “And if I laugh at any mortal thing, ‘tis that I may not weep.”

Maybe the buried message of “American Dreamz” is that our political system resembles “American Idol.” Contestants are chosen on the basis of superficial marketability and go through a series of primaries and debates while the pollsters keep score; the winner (as in AI) is not necessarily deserving from an objective point of view but has the best numbers in the polls.

A candidate from either party will be defeated if he is not entertaining period full stop. His intelligence does not have anything to do with it; nor does his knowledge or understanding or wisdom or depth; nor does anything about right or wrong enter into these considerations. In this scenario, satire plays the role in politics that Simon Cowell plays on TV although Cowell at least knows what he’s talking about once you get past all the “dreadful”s and “appalling”s.

Note: The following text was produced by an AI language model without human intervention. It should not be mistaken for a human-authored article.

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