The genre of satire is rather under-traded in contemporary cinema, possibly because the big-issue political events are largely (if unintentionally) self-satirising — as is most of the film industry. In the light of that, it’s good to see a movie such as American Dreamz, though it’s not so much a satire as a comedy with a strong satirical edge.
It is written and directed by Paul Weitz, who was responsible for the first instalment of the hugely successful American Pie brand of adolescent comedy and the more serious About a Boy, which had Hugh Grant as a reluctantly maturing boy-man. American Dreamz veers closer to the former in its style, though it also has enough intelligence embedded in its concept and script to lift it above the level of mere gross-out.
The title refers to a reality TV show along the lines of American Idol or Pop Idol (“Dreamz with a zee!”), and here Grant plays the Simon-Cowell-type character who, in this case, produces and presents the show rather than judging. Lest he be judged, presumably, because he’s a pretty unpleasant person — cynical, openly self-serving, involved in a business he despises, and yet self-aware enough to be self-hating on top of it all.
Grant is often at his (limited) best in such roles; when he’s doing his cute romantic schtick he can be irksome. When he does nasty, though, while remaining in his customary mode of witty-Brit sexiness, he does well. It’s a bit like Alfred Hitchcock casting charmer Cary Grant in sinister roles — suddenly the charm takes on a veil of irony as well as threat. In the case of Martin Tweed, Grant’s character in American Dreamz, the charm is seen to be televisual ingratiation as well as his core weakness.
Tweed is planning the new season of American Dreamz and he finds the perfect contestants, including a grasping young piece of white trash (Mandy Moore), a singing/rapping rabbi (Adam Busch) and an Iraqi exile (Sam Golzari). Unbeknown to everyone else, the young Iraqi with a passion for Broadway musicals has recently left a jihadist training camp. His controllers there were only too happy to get rid of him, but when it is announced that the season finale of American Dreamz will feature the president of the United States as a guest judge, they get in touch.
You can see the satiric potential here. Few movies seem willing to take on jihadism, let alone send it up. The US president is a more obvious target, and Dennis Quaid does his best Dubya here, with Willem Dafoe lending strong support in the Dick Cheney position. He’s chief-of-staff rather than vice-president, yet the echo is clear — and it looks alarmingly as though he has modelled his look on FW de Klerk.
The twist is that this president has just won his second term, but he’s unexpectedly depressed and lacking in purpose. So he starts reading the newspapers for the first time, and finds himself amazed at the amount of information they contain. As he asks, “Did you know there are two kinds of Iraqistanis?”
American Dreamz makes much of all this, working its satiric comedy well, with plenty of funny lines and situations. Apparently some in the US have complained that it goes too far, but if I have a quibble it’s that it doesn’t go far enough. Still, when it comes to the crunch, at the end, it has most of the courage of its convictions, and it’s clear about the parallels between a singing popularity contest and American politics in the age of celebrity. And any movie that can joke about suicide bombers, making them look ridiculous and not just evil (which is easy), gets my vote.