“We all love you, Iqbal,” his mother tells him when it is revealed that his cousin has accidentally stolen his place on “American Dreamz.” His response: “Great. How will that help make me famous?”
So all-powerful is the U.S.’s tabloid influence, even the terrorists, opposed as they are to the celluloid filth The Great Evil churns out, can’t help but be blinded by its glittering light. After describing to Omer how he will carry out a suicide bombing mission, his superior finishes with, “So, I have to ask, what’s Martin Tweed really like?”
It’s a bit risky for Weitz to use terrorists as a source for satire, but after the fear and grief they have inflicted on us, it’s rather comforting to laugh at a bunch bumbling, hypocritical Al Qaeda operatives. Not a little bit of the humor of that plot line comes from knowing how angry it would likely make the monsters that inspired it.
However, as astute and amusing as one half of American Dreamz is, the other is equally lazy and hackneyed. Its almost as if, exhausted from writing the A-story line of Martin Tweed and his television show, Weitz couldn’t be bothered to come up with anything original for the B-story of a simple-minded, war-loving president controlled by a balding, bespectled chief of staff (you might not imagine that Willem Dafoe could be made to look like Dick Cheney, but the costume and makeup people do an impressive job.)
There’s nothing wrong with a good chuckle at the President’s expense. Certainly Will Ferrell in his squinting, “strategery” heyday inspired quite a few. But these jokes have been so over-used even The New York Times had to roll their eyes at them.
Like a mentally-challenged child, the president (Dennis Quaid) must be told by his wife (Marcia Gay Harden, who delivers a perfect physical representation of Mrs. Bush) what “placebo” means. In the fifth year of his presidency and three years into the Iraq war, he realizes there are three kinds of “Iraqistanis”—Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds—and that they’re nothing like Dr. Octopus and Magneto, as his Presidential Briefings had told him. And his staff must constantly placate him by affirming that God did indeed choose him to be president.
On his show last week, Roger Ebert tried to defend this parade of worn-out taunts by appealing to our custom of making fun of presidents. It was a nice try, but when a characterization is funny, you don’t need to be reminded of “our great tradition of satirizing our political leaders,” you just laugh.