The line of division between satire and parody is caricature. Caricature, by my definition for those who don’t know, is when a character represents a generalized stereotype which is exaggerated for comedic purposes. American Dreamz is full of caricatures and is constantly at war with itself. It is keyed to the uncompromising cynicism of satire, but played in the broad tune of parody.

Take Dennis Quaid’s President Staton, an incompetent U.S. president who is, without any doubt, supposed to resemble President George W. Bush. However, the way the part is written and the way Quaid plays him is as caricature. What is so digging and uncompromising about satire is that the comedy is derived from characters acting more or less exactly as they would in real life. Take John Sayles’ political satire Silver City in which Chris Cooper also does a spin on Bush. Cooper plays the character straight. It’s not that his character is an idiot that makes him funny, but that he puts great amounts of serious thought into being an idiot. What American Dreamz doesn’t realize is that, stupid as Bush may be, he is not handicapped; he is still a living, thinking human being with dimensions. Cooper’s character could have walked off the screen and been a real politician. Quaid’s president exists solely within the universe that this film creates around him.

Then there is Martin Tweed (Hugh Grant), the host of a reality show called American Dreamz, which is clearly a spin-off of American Idol and Simon Cowell. The problem with this is that Cowell is already a satire of himself and American Idol functions within its own unintentional parameters as satire. Think of the difference in titles, American Idol makes no qualms about what or who it is looking for, which is a selling point. Idol is not so much concerned about making people’s dreams come true as it is finding the next new face that will bring in the highest sales figure and have the most longevity at doing so. That’s why Simon Cowell keeps doing it season after season despite how bored he clearly is by rehashing the same routine time and time again. He has already found his idol in Kelly Clarkson; the remainder is just to see how long he can keep on duping the American public while collecting a paycheck for doing it. Cowell is a fascinating character because he doesn’t even pretend to care about dreams, like the boring Tweed is supposed to. All he cares about is making money off gullible Americans.

My point is that, when you take people like President Bush or Simon Cowell and make them into caricatures, you strip these people of their human complexities and whittle them down to their cinematic binaries, which is, to function within the film as either comedy or melodrama. Satire is so biting because it finds its humor by presenting human complexity. American Dreamz is parody via the route of sitcom.

If you care about the story, after winning another term in office, the president disappears from the public eye for weeks at which point rumors begin to circulate amongst the press that he has lost his mind. Wanting to quench these rumors, the Chief of Staff (scene stealer William Dafoe who looks and sounds a lot like Dick Cheney) plans to get the president back into the public eye by staging appearances on Larry King, Oprah, and as a guest judge on the finale of American Dreamz. All the while Dafoe helps the incompetent president by telling him exactly what to say through a hidden earpiece, which, in Quaid’s best scene, malfunctions on the show, leaving the president to fend for himself.

One of the final contestants on the show are a middle-class white girl Sally (Mandy Moore). She looks sweet on the exterior but will do anything to win the competition, even if it means using her boyfriend William who she doesn’t love. William also happens to be an ex-marine sent home after his first day of duty in Iraq, who, in the films funniest scene, is wounded while driving to battle.

The other finalist is an Iraqi terrorist who loves show tunes and is ordered, after making it to the finals, to rig himself with a bomb at which point he, while sacrificing his own life, will also kill the president. It’s in these moments where the film finally finds itself as a funny parody, backing itself into a chaotic final act, which ends with a moment so cynical that calling it a happy ending would be like saying you got off lucky by getting punched in the face, the crotch being unharmed.

American Dreamz was directed by Paul Weitz who also made American Pie, the best teenaged sex comedy since Animal House, About a Boy, which teamed him with Grant in a sweet and funny adaptation of a Nick Hornby novel, and In Good Company, which brought warmth and humor into the world of corporate office politics. These films were successful in their clear depiction of lovable and emotionally drawn out characters. Here Weitz (who also wrote and produced) sees himself working with self-contained caricatures that, even though being mockeries of real people, do not have the depth to stretch beyond the parameters of this film. In twenty years, people will look back on American Dreamz and won’t understand the joke. On the bright side, it’s not that funny to begin with.