As 'American Idol' Ends, We Remember How Hugh Grant Got Simon-ized in '06 Satire 'American Dreamz'
Hugh Grant as the Simon Cowell-esque Martin Tweed in ‘American Dreamz’ (Photo: AF Archive/Alamy)
American Idol, the TV juggernaut that made household names of Ryan Seacrest, Kelly Clarkson, and Carrie Underwood — and brought the twisted pleasure of watching Simon Cowell insult aspiring vocalists into our living rooms — ends its remarkable 15-season run tonight. With its once-stellar ratings long since fallen back to earth, it’s easy now to forget what a phenomenon Idol still looked like 10 years ago when writer-director Paul Weitz’s American Dreamz, a satire exploring the musical competition show’s stranglehold on pop culture, arrived in theaters.
Weitz’s film offered moviegoers a twisted reflection of the America we were living in circa 2006. Few took the bait. In its first weekend of release, American Dreamz barely cracked the top 10 at the box office; during its theatrical run, it earned a meager $7.1 million. Reviews were also a mixed bag. The New York Times flat-out panned it: “The jokes don’t just fizzle into insignificance,” Manohla Dargis wrote, “they flop about with gaudy ineffectualness, gasping for air like newly landed trout.” Entertainment Weekly, on the other hand, gave it a B+. “The surprise of American Dreamz is that it’s a blithe, funny, and engaging movie,” said Owen Gleiberman, “not because the targets are any subtler than they sound, but because writer-director Paul Weitz (About a Boy, In Good Company) has made the shrewd move of staging the film on a human scale, in the homespun wackadoo spirit of a ’40s screwball comedy.”
‘American Dreamz’: Watch the trailer
To be clear: American Dreamz is flawed. As Gleiberman notes, the then-topical issues it put in its crosshairs are a bit too obvious and, to Dargis’s point, its LOLs are too often MIA. But as a gentle satire that sounds a warning about the increasingly blurry line between political reality and showbiz fakery, as well as an inherent dishonesty in the public personas that people create and fans are all too eager to accept at face value, it’s a pretty interesting movie to revisit a decade later. (Find it currently streaming on Netflix and Amazon.)
American Dreamz arrived at a key moment when the notion that anyone could get famous had become a universally acknowledged truth but still hadn’t quite cemented into obviousness. This was post-rise-of-reality-TV, obviously, but still pre-social media; Facebook had not yet gone fully mainstream, Twitter wouldn’t launch until the following July, and Tumblr still just looked like a misspelled word. It was also before Keeping Up With the Kardashians, selfie sticks, and YouTube stars getting lucrative book deals. The housing bubble still had a few months before bursting, and George W. Bush had two years left in the White House.
Related: ‘American Idol’: Judging the Judges, Week 13 (Yahoo TV)
Weitz cast Dennis Quaid as a not even semi-veiled version of Bush, a clueless commander in chief who becomes so depressed after deciding to read the newspapers that the only way to salvage his approval ratings is by booking him as a guest judge on the wildly popular singing competition show American Dreamz. That same show provides the platform for a musical showdown between the attention-hungry, Kelly Clarkson-esque Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore), who curries favor with the voting public by playing up her not-entirely-genuine romance with an earnest Iraq War veteran (Chris Klein), and Omer (Sam Golzari), a showtune-loving Muslim man secretly aligned with a terrorist organization that expects him to go full suicide bomb when the president appears on the show. The central theme here: No one is exactly like the person they are presenting themselves to be, a concept that, certainly within the context of social media, is now firmly braided into our daily lives.
Watch a representative from the show (Seth Meyers) help Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore) shape her TV persona in a scene from ‘American Dreamz’:
The idea that a president can save himself by appearing on a show patterned after American Idol is a deliberately silly conceit on Weitz’s part. And yet, 10 years on — with a former reality competition show personality now making a legitimate run for the presidency and a current president who has made appearances on shows like Running Wild With Bear Grylls and Between Two Ferns, that plot point seems prescient. Like Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, a much more savage critique of American culture that also quietly came and went in 2006, American Dreamz occasionally feels like a piece of societal foreshadowing.
While Weitz invites the audience to empathize with his characters, an approach that ultimately sands down the movie’s fangs and deprives its satirical elements of genuine bite, there’s one character who remains consistently despicable from start to finish: Hugh Grant’s Martin Tweed, the Simon Cowell-ish judge/host/executive producer of American Dreamz who embodies the worst qualities one imagines that the driving force behind a reality show might have, both then and now. Convinced that the competition needs more interesting contestants, at one point Tweed barks at his two producers, played by John Cho and Judy Greer: “I want an Arab. And bring me a Jew.” It’s the sort of line that could easily spill out of the mouth of Quinn King, the ruthless reality-TV showrunner played by Constance Zimmer on Lifetime’s UnREAL. In some ways, American Dreamz feels like it’s drafting a blueprint for what a show like UnREAL, a soapier and sharper excoriation of The Bachelor, would become.
Related: Paul and Chris Weitz’s Depth of Field Inks First-Look Deal With Amazon Studios
As much as Weitz mocks American Idol for its hokeyness and relentless positivity (at least when Tweed isn’t talking), he stops short of completely condemning it and its audience. As the director told Terri Gross on a 2006 episode of NPR’s Fresh Air, he eventually started watching and enjoying the show himself, so he gets its appeal. As a consequence, American Dreamz can’t decide whether to put American Idol on full, unadulterated blast or shrug its shoulders and concede, “Aw, it’s not so bad.” That’s what makes the film so tonally inconsistent. But it also makes it an accurate reflection of American culture’s love/hate relationship with Idol over the past 14 years.
