Dream On

The new Big Brother: Sally (Mandy Moore) belts out a tune on “American Dreamz,” a reality show hosted by Martin Tweed (Hugh Grant, on screen) in the film American Dreamz. Photo Glen Wilson/Universal Studios.

Paul Weitz’s new film, American Dreamz, purports to be a scathing satire of American culture, but its targets — the banality of reality TV, the damning superficiality of celebrity culture and the fatuousness of the current U.S. administration — are about as soft as cotton candy. In a world where a warbler like William Hung gets his 15 minutes, parody is moot. Humour, however, is still imperative, something that Weitz seems to have forgotten.

The writer-director is most famous for creating the American Pie franchise. In recent years, he has graduated to more middlebrow, grown-up fare like In Good Company and About a Boy. The latter starred Hugh Grant who, in American Dreamz, plays Martin Tweed, the venal host of a singing show called “American Dreamz.” Tweed is Simon Cowell with a more metrosexual coif. Not content with his show’s blockbuster ratings, Tweed demands that his toadying producers find even more outlandish contestants than the usual tuneless singers. (His words: “Bring me some freaks.”) To this end, the producers locate a show-tune-loving Arab from L.A. named Omer (Sam Golzari) and Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore), a trailer-trash teen queen whose greatest biographical detail is that her boyfriend (Chris Klein) is a U.S. soldier recently wounded in Iraq.

Concurrent with this development is the re-election of sweetly moronic American president Staton (Dennis Quaid) whose resemblance to one George W. Bush is anything but coincidental. Staton feels an odd pang of conscience at the beginning of his second term; he decides to start reading newspapers and books rather than relying on the briefs provided by his vice-president, Sutter (Willem Dafoe, playing a Dick Cheney/Karl Rove amalgam). In one of the film’s few good jokes, the veep begins to doubt Staton’s sanity when the prez starts reading the Canadian press. Staton’s newfound interest in international news and non-fiction books like Jihad Vs. McWorld makes his staff very nervous. To invigorate Staton’s sagging popularity numbers, Sutter convinces the president to guest-host the season finale of American Dreamz.

Say you love me: Omer (Sam Golzari), another contestant, awaits audience reaction in American Dreamz. Photo Glen Wilson/Universal Studios.

Unbeknownst to the show’s producers, however, star contestant Omer is no mere Tommy Tune wannabe. In fact, he’s been trained in an al-Qaeda-style camp and is a (somewhat bumbling) member of a sleeper cell operating out of L.A. Advancing to the final round of “American Dreamz” puts Omer in the perfect position to assassinate the president. Sally, meanwhile, is pursuing her own agenda — to win the competition at any cost. (Kelly Clarkson, the most famous American Idol to date, might want to sue, given the physical and biographical similarities to Moore’s character.) Tweed, to his surprise, finds Sally’s mercenary self-regard an even match for his own, and slowly begins to fall for the fresh-faced vixen.

To sustain such a dense, preposterous plot, a director needs to resort to a lot of shorthand. Unsurprisingly, American Dreamz is chock-full of caricature and stereotypes. Omer’s gay cousin/manager is, of course, alternately preening and hysterical; Sally’s mother (the usually brilliant Jennifer Coolidge) is, of course, a ruthless show-business mom; Tweed’s mother, of course, never loved him. As for the mujahedeen, despite their hatred of America, they love American Dreamz — presumably because watching people make fools of themselves is a universal joy. Of course.

The film’s over-the-top climax — which features a bomb, a marriage proposal and a genuinely passionate rendition of My Way — strives for a kind of madcap surrealism, but feels more like a Saturday Night Live skit gone into overtime. (The feeling is reinforced by the presence of SNL’s Seth Meyers as Sally’s sleazy agent, one of the film’s bright spots.) American Dreamz aspires to scabrous parody à la Team America World Police, but the genius of the latter was that it lampooned everybody — from Saddam to Bush to actor-cum-activist Sean Penn.

Ultimately, Weitz’s film isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know; as political satires go, it doesn’t go far enough. Weitz is guilty of the same simplistic thinking he mocks, but his lack of originality seems to escape his withering gaze. Where his characters are governed by self-loathing, Weitz is driven by pure self-satisfaction.

Producing more pop culture dross doesn’t relieve us from the onslaught that already exists. At one point, Omer asks the question, “Are Americans responsible for America?” the answer the film gives is, “Yes, kind of.” Weitz, however, skirts his own complicity. The result? American Dreamzzzzzz.

American Dreamz opens April 21 across Canada.

Jason McBride is a Toronto-based writer and editor.

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