A comedy starring four-time Emmy winner Peter Dinklage and the legendary Oscar winner Shirley MacLaine (who at age 88, still has three upcoming projects listed on IMDB)? Sounds like a recipe for success. Yet there’s something about American Dreamer that just doesn’t work. That's a shame given that these actors are so talented and putting them together should work very well. Paul Dektor’s directorial debut is still a perfectly decent way to spend 106 minutes, but it’s not as funny or satisfying as it could be…
Dinklage plays Phillip, a disgruntled economics professor whose ambitions include getting a parking space in the university lot and owning a house. A too-good-to-be-true opportunity presents itself when he comes across a listing for a large, beautiful home whose price is greatly reduced with the caveat that its tenant, Astrid (MacLaine), will live there until she dies. Led to believe by his real estate agent friend Dell (Matt Dillon) that her health is failing and he’ll soon inherit the entire property, Dinklage pulls out funds from his 401k and scrapes together every penny he has to put together the money. Unsurprisingly, he soon learns that the irritable - and generally quite mean - Astrid isn’t going anywhere soon.
There are some logic gaps in the setup of this film, namely the fact that Phillip uses literally all of his money to buy the house with no thought to taxes or any other recurring costs he’ll now have to pay. He also doesn’t ask any of the right questions. Neither does Dell and while real estate brokers don’t always have a great reputation for really helping their clients, this feels like a stretch. A plot twist involving the supposedly lonely Astrid also begs the question of why nobody did any research into this mysterious seller (Danny Glover’s over-the-top private investigator comes in later for just this purpose).
Those who know Dinklage beyond Game of Thrones are aware of his talents and that he can do more than just grumble and complain (see The Station Agent and Cyrano for his range). Similarly, MacLaine was absolutely terrific in the underrated 2017 film The Last Word (available on Starz), which she starred in opposite Amanda Seyfried; If only this film could had given her similar material to work with since she could have been superb again. Matt Dillon’s lackluster performance exemplifies the film’s nature -- an idea that looks and sounds fantastic but turns out to be a bit of a disappointment. B-
American Dreamer is screening in the Spotlight Narrative section at the 2022 Tribeca Festival.