Dreams With a Z

Sometimes you just have to laugh. Not seeing the challenge in making already exhausted and terrified cinemagoers even more miserable, in the 1940s a director called Preston Sturges made a series of satirical comedies about WWII, each one a masterpiece. Mistaken identities, coincidences and accidents, contrivances and caricatures were all mashed together in zippy, wise and funny entertainments that at their hearts, said it was ok to laugh at it all. Even the gravest fate can be made to appear ridiculous. Although he set out initially to make a serious film, once he started reading about it, there was something so cosmically unilateral about Mutually Assured Destruction for Stanley Kubrick, the only option was slapstick. His pitch black, acid farce is framed around a clownish cabal of madmen, somehow entrusted to positions where they hold the fate of mankind in their hands. Even if they no longer control the hand, they cling to power though arrogance and private stupidity. So, in the current climate, Paul Weitz is to be commended for trying to make America laugh again in the face of disaster, even if in American Dreamz, the frame for the farce is far glitzier and he forgot to write any actual jokes.

Taking on Bush and the war in Iraq, Weitz, who directed American Pie and About A Boy, also takes a pop at American culture in the shape of their Pop Idol clone, ‘American Dreamz’, a karaoke-text TV show that enjoys 92% of the available television audience. It’s mean, smirking presenter, and the most famous man on the face of the planet, is the black-clad, self-centred Brit, Martin Tweed (Hugh Grant). The recently-single Tweed is plotting the new season of his smash hit show in his fabulous mansion appointed with Ferraris and wall-sized televisions, but Tweed is bored with success, and the ease with which he attained it. He wants to change things around on the show so sends his producers (John Cho and Judy Greer) out into the heartland to find a no-hoper to go up against whatever ‘talent’ rears its head. On the other side of the continent, President Staton (Dennis Quaid doing a puzzled George Dubya impression) is also coming off the back of a success, he’s just been re-elected but is hardly aware of it. He’s a bit off-colour, happier to stay home and mope than meet his people. Worse, he has started reading the newspapers they read, rather than his prepared briefings, which has made him even more depressed. Despite the ministrations of his first lady (Marcia Gay Harden) and his micro-managing chief-of-staff (Willem Dafoe), like Tweed beyond in LA, The President wants to shake things up a bit.

Into the frame comes Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore), whose scrubbed, pale yellow exterior hides a neck like a jockey’s bollocks. She’s more than ready to be plucked from the herd and have her ‘dreams’ come ‘true’, with the help of her agent and a media-savvy young woman’s innate grasp of what works best for the reality TV audience; a mix of tears and teeth. Up against her is Tweed’s not-so-cunning plant Omer (Sam Golzari), the glitter-wearing, show-tune loving no-hoper Arab immigrant; there to capture the audience’s sympathies and keep them watching and calling and texting from week to week. Circumstances have contrived to connect Omer with a terrorist cell in LA, who love the high-life as much as the most satanic capitalist and have dark plans for Omer’s sudden high profile. When the President, now keen to connect with the kids and show his range, agrees to be a guest judge on the final show of the season, everything comes crashing together.

Even in synopsis, the script with which Weitz delivers his satire is messy and uneven. Welding the mood of frantic screwball to a supposedly biting farce that squares up to international terrorism, the buffoonery of elected officials and the all-pervasive power of commercial television is a good idea, ripe for comedy you’d think, but the results are flat and toothless. Without the razor sharp writing to merit tackling the touchy material, there’s little in the film beyond the performances of the cast to justify the effort. Grant, hampered by the fractured nature of the story and the lack of any good jokes, still manages to play a nasty, unhappy man with charm and energy, even if both are darker and more muted than usual. Luckily Dennis Quaid has the brilliant Willem Dafoe to help him out with his very thin parody of Bush, the two of them establishing a tender and amusing co-dependency that is marred by some tired tomfoolery with an earpiece that prompts the President when he’s speechifying. Mandy Moore does well as the determined, media-savvy contestant, plucked from obscurity by the producer’s agenda and all to willing to buy into it. She too has a fixer, an agent who will ‘appear mean and greedy, so you don’t have to’, as one character describes his function. Newcomer Sam Golarz, playing the reluctant martyr Omer, is likewise being controlled by his bungling sleeper cell, devoted terrorists all too easily distracted by the comforts of American life. Golarz makes the multi-stereotypical Arab kid rounded and likable. Somehow, and I really don’t know how, Golarz’s enthusiasm brings something new to the old standards (Luck Be A Lady, I Did It My Way) he is mandated by the plot to belt out, while dressed as an imbecile. An actor who can do that is doing a fine job. The results are not all that funny, but it’s not his fault.

Perhaps it has something to do with timing. Bush, remember, was elected six years ago and was labelled a dummy on or about day three. American Dreamz again sees him as a monkey but since he managed to get himself re-elected, and is currently fighting a war on every front he can find, to underestimate him and his cronies seems, to me, to be a trivialisation and a mistake. The caricature is too easy and Weitz doesn’t make it any more difficult for himself than he has to. The same is true of Pop Idol, which made its debut in 2001 and was quickly co-opted for comedy. Without going as far as citing Wag The Dog, after 15 years of The Simpsons, a fresh approach is required. Odious though he may be, Simon Cowell is not the problem.

America - the fool, according to Weitz - is a nation in thrall to its elbow-tugging inner child. It just wants to go play. As a people, they all dream of the same thing, to have fame, riches and glory. Not to earn it, to have it bestowed upon them. Not the glory of discovering cures for disease or building rockets to Mars, though there is a sizeable constituency of Americans who dream outside of themselves, but they’re not pretty enough for network TV. The collective fantasy, ingrained in the American mind, is popularity; to be loved and to love them for loving you. To make some kind of difference. To earn applause. Wouldn't it make you sick?

In the end, perhaps American Dreamz says that in order to hear the hoots of acclaim, people require management, or at least they feel the desire to be managed. Dreams and philosophies will only get you so far in a country devoted to forward momentum, to action and resolution. Mediocre singers, mediocre singer’s mothers and boyfriends, all the way up to the Commander-in-Chief, even terrorists; they are all requiring of middle-men and enablers. On the few occasions that Weitz narrows his beam, it's the hucksters that get burnt.

Even if the film doesn’t all work, it is heartening to see that someone over there is willing to take a jab at the dumber aspects of their society, and increasingly, our shared cultural world. Be it the Lithium glow of network television and its insidious global reach, the way ambition beats talent in the race for recognition or the preposterous nature of fashion and consumption. They all get a roasting, no matter how low the temperature is set, up to and including the administration that misinforms and manipulates in order to fulfil an agenda that perhaps, if we are honest about it, we are better off remaining ignorant about. Weitz sometimes pulls his already feeble punches, there is no doubt about that, but at least he's taking a swing.