'Idol' spoof short on range

The satire's sharp, but the jokes can't go the distance

Christy Lemire, Associated Press

Friday, April 21, 2006

Like the catchiest pop song, American Dreamz can be exuberantly fun, bring a smile to your face, even leave you feeling slightly giddy after it's over. And it provides zero in terms of actual substance.

Writer-director Paul Weitz's parody of American Idol and America's president is dead-on, filled with perfect details, sharp dialogue and many reasons to laugh out loud.

Dennis Quaid is a wholly inspired choice to play the good-ol'-boy commander in chief, who understands why the country is at war in Iraq only when it's explained to him in terms of comic-book characters.

And Hugh Grant functions beautifully as an amalgamation of Ryan Seacrest, Simon Cowell and American Idol creator Simon Fuller - arrogant and acerbic but quick-witted and strangely irresistible.

Weitz gets the tone right nearly all the time, and his portrayals of the presidency and the wildly popular talent competition don't feel too far off from the real things.

But even as the film expertly re-enacts these phenomena, it has absolutely nothing insightful or refreshing to say about them.

Wannabe pop stars are ambitious and will say or do anything - even trot out an injured war veteran as part of their back story - to gain sympathy and support from an ever-fickle public. Politicians are managed by an array of handlers who dictate everything they say and do, if only to further their own agendas.

And your point is what?

Once Weitz sets up these jokes, it seems he doesn't know where to go with them.

He does start out strong, though, with Grant's Martin Tweed savoring the typically stellar ratings of his TV singing contest, American Dreamz, while breaking up with his latest adoring, blond girlfriend. ("You make me feel like being a better person," he explains. "And I'm not a better person. I'm me.")

The next morning, Quaid's President Staton wakes up after a close election to find he still has a job.

"It was a helluva fight," he says, pointing emphatically with a slice of toast. "The important thing is, the good guys won."

(By his side in bed is Marcia Gay Harden, a Texan like the Bushes, doing an eerily accurate impersonation of a Laura-like first lady.)

Their paths ultimately will collide when the president's chief of staff (Willem Dafoe) suggests that he could get a popularity boost by appearing as a guest judge during the finals on American Dreamz.

Among the top contestants are Sally (Mandy Moore), a small-town Midwestern girl with diva-like, big-city aspirations, and Omer (Sam Golzari), who has left Baghdad to meet up with his sleeper cell in Orange County, and whose love of performing show tunes lands him on American Dreamz completely by accident.

If you faithfully watch Idol (and 30 million viewers do every week), you'll be thrilled with the attention to detail: the stage, the shameless product placement, the withering criticism. Martin Tweed - Tweedy, as he's known - describes one singer's performance as "a musical Ebola virus."

By the time the president gets there, he's begun reading the newspaper for the first time in his life and is actually trying to think seriously about what's going in the world.

And so when someone shows up with a bomb during the eagerly awaited American Dreamz finale, he knows how to handle it. Sort of.

It's all joyfully cynical, if that's possible. And it makes you wish that Weitz, to borrow a phrase from Idol judge Paula Abdul, had taken the material and really made it his own.