Hollywood liberals have a special place in the conservative hall
of loathing. A prime place, right up on the altar, between Hillary
Clinton and Al Sharpton. Dennis Kucinich would sell a kidney for
that spot.
And every now and again, at a point that usually coincides with
rafts of right-wing editorializing on how out of touch Hollywood is
with its average, conservative viewer, the entertainment industry
spikes back at Red America with movies like Fahrenheit
9/11 or Good Night and Good Luck. In the context of
this rapidly-getting-old tit-for-tat, American Dreamz —
an omnibus satire of America’s reality TV habit, its war on
terrorism and its current administration — seems, from its
trailers, just another gob of partisan spittle.
Close. American Dreamz is mediocre, but in a particular
way that should make audiences realize the problem with Hollywood’s
politics is something bigger than its high- and soft-minded
liberalism.
Writer/director/producer Paul Weitz (the latter-day Prometheus
who brought humanity the American Pie franchise) was
actually on to something insightful when he came up with the idea
for American Dreamz. His inspiration, he’s said, “Was just
the weird feeling of, being like a lot of Americans and sort of
reading the paper in the morning and worrying about terrorism…and
then in the evening worrying even more about whether Constantine
was going to get kicked off American Idol.”
Not genius, but a real observation. The movie he made out of it
tells three stories.
On the Afghan-Pakistan border, gentle al Qaeda recruit Omer
Obedi (Sam Golzari) is furtively practicing his jazz hands,
whispering along to show tunes in his tent when his commander
bursts in. His American visa has come through. He’s to go stay with
his relatives in Orange County until his cell is activated. “When
will that be?” Omer asks. “Never,” mumbles the chief, stomping
out.
Never arrives shortly after Omer’s irrepressible jazz hands get
him a spot on America’s most popular reality-contest-starmaker
show, American Dreamz. The series finale is to be guest
judged by President Joseph Stanton (Dennis Quaid). Omer gets orders
to advance to the final round and detonate himself on live TV.
Shadowed (in moments overshadowed) by a trio of terrorist
handlers (who ooze incipient Stooge-ness during planning meetings
spent in hot tubs, sipping grapefruit smoothies, and misapplying
skin lotion), Omer slices through the clipped progression of
rounds. Everything about the familiar competition — Omer’s stage
costume a la Sergeant Pepper, his embarrassing post-song tagline
(“You’ve been Omer-ized”) — works into a single, workmanlike gag.
Faults emerge, but an anti-American terrorist on American
Idol: that’s a solid high concept.
Plot two, not so much. Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore) is the stock
small-town-girl-with-big-dreams. Or so the American Dreamz
producers think when they descend, cameras rolling, to pull her on
the show. She’s actually an icy fame-seeking robot who’s twice as
Hollywood as the Hollywood types who think they’re using her.
This story’s comic bassline is nothing special. All the jokes
that have been making the late night monologue rounds about
American Idol for years — the superficiality, the hype,
the sex with contestants — here find cinematic form. It manages to
trundle along though. Partly because Martin Tweed (Hugh Grant), the
show’s embittered, uber-Cowell host, starts to fall in a
narcissistic sort of love with her. Partly because Moore is
surprisingly able with her character. Partly because American
Idol’s formulaic sentimentality and farce have given the world
so much to be ironic about.
From clever to passable to…well, what’s a word for derivative
squared? Story three opens with President Stanton waking up on the
morning after his re-election vaguely unsettled. He decides to read
the New York Times on a whim. All of a sudden, he can’t
stop reading, and his world turns upside down. Vice President
Sutter (Willem Dafoe) can’t control him anymore. The press is
starting to ask questions. His numbers are falling. So in
desperation, Sutter-Cheney sticks a mic in the president’s ear and
books him on American Dreamz.
The handful of scenes that are supposed to get Bush (er,
Stanton) from point A to point B are a recitation of everything
that lightly informed people can’t stand about the president. Bush
is a moron. (“Did you know there are two types of Iraqistanis?” he
asks: classic.) Bush is a religious maniac. Cheney is the puppet
master. To bring it all to life, Weitz falls back on the standard
tropes: the Texas twang, the malapropisms, the meathead
swagger.
The effect is something like watching paint dry while listening
to nails drag across a chalkboard. Not because it’s a liberal
caricature, but because it’s the same liberal caricature the
audience has seen 10,000 times before: in every political cartoon,
every Saturday Night Live sketch, every tartly
photoshopped Daily Show graphic since 2000. On the great
scale of insipid political statements, “President Bush is a dumb”
runs neck and neck with “Weather sure is nice today.” And that’s
what a third of American Dreamz is all about.
If Weitz had put as little thought into his movie’s dialog as he
did into its political shading, it might be said that he phoned it
in: industry idiom for doing the bare minimum.
Conservatives often wail that Hollywood is such a nefariously
liberal place that it would be impossible to find a single
out-of-the-closet Republican on a studio lot if you tried. Too
true. Though you don’t find many Trotskyites or Buddhist
anarcho-theocrats either.
The entertainment industry isn’t one that thinks substantively
or originally about politics, even as it throws its own up on
screen with hammy passion. Writers, directors, and writer/directors
who indulge their leanings in their work are just recycling
opinions and images from the center-left milieu.
Ultimately, phoning in plot, cinematography or performance makes
for a disposable film. American Dreamz illustrates the
same goes for phoned-in politics.
