Search - American Dreamz on DVD

Mostly a mess

Farffleblex Plaffington | Parnybarnel, Mississippi | 11/16/2006

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Not much about American Dreamz worked for me as it should have, unless the point was an unfocused, mostly unfunny and non-entertaining film that tries to demonstrate the cliché that truth is stranger than fiction. It doesn't work as a spoof, it doesn't work as a slightly humorous critical commentary on anything, and it doesn't work as a purely fantastical story.

The aim seems to have been a spoof of the television show "American Idol", of George W. Bush, of militant Islamism, and very slightly of American culture in general. That's the first problem. American Dreamz tries to do too many things. There are too many disparate threads that not only are never quite woven together, but many are left by the wayside. For much of its length, it feels like we're bouncing back and forth among a number of different films, and because of this, nothing has a chance to develop very well. Many good actors are more or less wasted. Because of the too varied structure, even some stars who get a relatively significant amount of screen time are wasted. For example, while the Bush spoof usually doesn't work very well as a spoof, Dennis Quaid's portrayal of the dim-witted and odd President Staton is often interesting and occasionally funny, but he's just not in the film enough; if the story had been focused almost exclusively on President Staton, it might have been successful.

The American Idol spoof material fails for three reasons:

One, Hugh Grant can't carry the role. He has to function as the three American Idol judges (with a strong emphasis on Simon Cowell) and host Ryan Seacrest all rolled into one. It requires a maybe impossibly complex and conflicted character, with Grant barely scratching the surface. Of course, it doesn't help that like everyone else, he has to fight for screen time with too many different stories.

Two (and this shows another reason why too many threads was a bad idea), for one aspect of the American Idol spoof material, writer/director Paul Weitz errs on the side of making his focus too narrow. There aren't enough contestants to follow, and the funneling down of the judges and host into one person fails in theory, too. Part of what makes American Idol work is that we get to know a number of different personalities by way of seeing the same contestants over many weeks, and of course by getting to know and watch the interesting combination of judge and host personalities. In American Dreamz, it's as if there are really only two contestants (with a later addition of one cardboard cutout contestant who is good for a couple jokes), and again because of the poor structure, we hardly get to know them. Having only two contestants and one host/judge doesn't seem like a good idea any way you slice it.

Three, and this may be the most important one, American Dreamz is never as funny, ridiculous, bizarre, sad, poignant or inspiring as American Idol can be throughout the course of a season.

The militant Islamism and general American culture stuff suffers primarily from being severely underdeveloped. Enough of the material set in and concerning the militant camp overseas is kinda funny, but there's just not much of it in the film. And the general American culture spoof is so wispy that it's difficult to say if it was even an intention.

Of course, as a spoof, the point is not to approximate qualities and facts of the real-world material being spoofed. And too many threads wouldn't have to be a bad thing. I love the Scary Movie films. They definitely get a lot "wrong" about what they're spoofing, and the ridiculous alternation of many different stories is part of what makes them work. But when the material that you're spoofing is far funnier and more weird/bizarre than your spoof, it's difficult to even consider your work to be in that genre. Furthermore, if your work is intended as a (cultural) critique, that can't function correctly when the stuff you're critiquing is transparently far more complex and nuanced than your critique. And for just straight-ahead entertainment, which seems like maybe it was the point on some of the American Idol spoof material, such as a couple of the songs, neither the songs nor the performances were anywhere near as good or enjoyable as the worst night on American Idol, and that can get pretty bland.

I'm not one to usually agree with the following, but this case is an exception: it seems like Weitz didn't have a clear idea of what he wanted to accomplish with this film. He needed to pick one basic idea--a spoof of President Bush, a critique of the office of the Presidency, an absurdist look at militant Islamism, a cynical film about American Idol . . . whatever, and commit to it. As American Dreamz stands, there is only a collection of half-baked and half-realized ideas mucking about in a chaotic jumble with maybe accidental moments (although maybe not accidental as they tend to be when Weitz pushes absurdist comic material) that reach their potential. Hardly recommendable.

Think for a moment about hit pop records. They can be spoofed/parodied/satirized effectively--just listen to some Weird Al Yankovich. But American Dreamz, rather than taking that road, seems to me like those old K-Tel versions of pop songs (the ones with "Not the original artists" in tiny writing on the bottom near the copyright data). It's just a pale imitation of the real thing, with not much to say about the original that we didn't already know, and certainly not more entertaining than the original, but rather more vacuous, where the producers seem to have not quite understood what made the originals work, and neither do they try to do anything different with the material."