What have we done to piss off Paul Weitz? As the director responsible for such box-office dynamite as "About a Boy" and "In Good Company," Weitz can hardly claim to have done wrong by the American public. Why, then, has he chosen to punish us by regurgitating a steaming mess of our own cultural blemishes in the form of his latest "American Dreamz?" Perhaps Weitz has grown jaded by his unbroken string of commercial success, and has decided to wreak vengeance on his loyal audience by inflicting upon them a film so howlingly awful that it erases all the fond memories of his earlier work. Maybe he just got bored with making good movies. We may never know the explanation, but after being forced to sit through nearly two hours of "American Dreamz," I kinda feel like Weitz owes us one.
It all starts with a screech. The screech in question belongs to Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore), an aspiring pop singer who dreams of performing on the television show "American Dreamz." I wondered, since the filmmakers were obviously so tickled with the idea of misspelling the word "Dreamz" in both the show and the movie title, why they didn't just go all the way and call it "Amerikan Dreemz" or something like that. I guess they didn't want to seem too gimmicky. Mission accomplished.
But back to that screech. The reason Sally feels the need to flawlessly replicate the sound of nails on a chalkboard is because a camera crew at the front door has informed her that she's been selected to perform on the show. This revelation hurls Sally into paroxysms of shrill self-adulation so terrifying that the cameraman ducks for cover and misses the shot. The scene is then restaged so that Sally can go on screeching for another 15 seconds. By the time they were replaying the tape back in the office for the third round, I was convinced that Paul Weitz had a personal vendetta against my eardrums.
But silly me, I've gotten so caught up in all the screeching that I failed to mention that the President of the United States is also in this movie. George W. Bush himself must have been too costly for the film's limited budget, since the filmmakers have opted instead to cast the bargain-basement version of our illustrious Commander-in-Chief: Dennis Quaid. On the morning following his reelection, the President decides to pick up a newspaper for the first time in four years, and excitedly informs his chief of staff, "Did you know that there are two kinds of Iraqistanis? Actually, I mean three kinds of Iraqis." Somewhere in Hollywood, a screenwriter is buying himself a drink.
The President, as it turns out, is going through some sort of post-reelection mental breakdown and withdraws from the public eye for three weeks, because in this movie presidents can do things like that without inciting national panic. The president's aide (Willem Dafoe) decides that the President should go on a "publicity blitz" to assure the world that he's still alive and well. As part of this blitz, the president is booked to appear as a guest judge on "American Dreamz," alongside the show's host Martin Tweed (Hugh Grant, whose alarmingly smarmy performance should come with its own sick bag).
When we finally get to the show itself, the parallels to "American Idol" are unmistakable. A series of performers, too good to be bad and too bad to be enjoyable, test their vocal cords against Tweed's judgmental ear. The movie adds an unusual twist to this familiar set-up; instead of the usual white-bread crooners, we get a Hispanic guy, a black girl with a big afro, a Hasidic Jew who raps DMX songs, and so forth. Each of these characters is given about 10 seconds of screen-time, during which we are encouraged to laugh at their combination of ethnicity and musical aspirations. The only contestant besides Sally who gets his own plotline is an Arabic guy named Omer (Sam Golzari). Guess why he's important? That's right, he's a terrorist.
We learn that Omer the Arabic terrorist has been positioned on the show by his superiors to get close to the president and detonate a suicide bomb. The only problem is that Omer's dreams of martyrdom are in conflict with his dreams of stardom; he can't decide between self-explosion and a record deal. I would complain that a suicide bomber who harbors secret dreams of being the next Justin Timberlake is mildly unrealistic, but does anything in this movie really make sense? To be fair, I'm not sure it intends to -- the deliberate exaggeration of everything in the film, from the writing to the acting to the nauseatingly bright color scheme, makes it abundantly clear that we're dealing with a satirical farce here. And that would be fine, if not for all the dull thuds where the laughs should be.
The fundamental miscalculation that sinks "American Dreamz" is Weitz's fatal inability to tell the difference between satire and parody. Giving Dennis Quaid's president bad grammar and a Southern accent is an obvious send-up of Bush, but without any real critique of Dubya's politics, the performance becomes imitation for imitation's sake. However, it turns out that the President is only one of many brain-dead twits that occupy the movie. All the characters are so lobotomized by Weitz's directorial scalpel that their conversations often degenerate into confused stares, with huge pauses in the dialogue to accommodate the audience's non-existent laughter. Watching these actors float through such a stratosphere of inanity, I longed for the movie to end so that I could rejoin the world of the sane.
One final note: There is a tiny role in "American Dreamz" of Tweed's personal assistant, played by obscure character actor John Cho. Cho has less than 10 lines of dialogue in the film, which correspond to the only funny moments in the entire two hours. I suggest this movie be remade with Cho in the starring role, as an inter-dimensional traveler stranded in a universe of abrasive ninnies.
