Newsroom creator’s U.S. satire lacks subtlety

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This article was published 22/04/2017 (3447 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg-spawned filmmaker Ken Finkleman’s career is a bit of an oddity. He seemed to start with a big Hollywood career, writing or directing a couple of lesser sequels (Grease 2, Airplane II: The Sequel) before he eventually won respect in the realm of Canadian television (The Newsroom, More Tears).

The low-budget satire An American Dream: The Education of William Bowman would appear to be a step toward further prestige. It’s a Canadian view of contemporary American madness using the template of Voltaire’s proto-satire Candide, the ribald adventures of an innocent gaining experience in a corrupt world.

Finkleman’s Candide is William Bowman (Jake Croker), a college football player who suffers a concussion and is compelled to go out and make his way in the world.

Even enjoying the advantages of a presentable white guy, he suffers a series of escalating setbacks. In the corporate world, parroting his boss’s ruthless credo of greed earns him the promise of advancement… for about a minute, before his job is lost in the whirlwind environment of corporate takeovers. From there, he falls in with a TV evangelist of predictably perverse proclivities. Sitting in at a town hall meeting, where every town councillor proudly trumpets their freedom to bear arms, he emerges as the sole survivor when they turn their guns on each other.

He is a first-hand witness to “fake news” when he hears a radio report of a tragedy just before it happens. And soon he is on the run as a fugitive, albeit a TV star fugitive thanks to a TV camera implanted in his eyeball.

This is not subtle satire. Deploying a cleverly managed low budget, Finkleman uses a baseball bat, as opposed to a scalpel, to swing at big fat targets, including gun lust, religious hypocrisy and a hopelessly compromised media. It’s not an advantage for Finkleman that the excesses of the Trump era are so ridiculous, they’re practically self-satirizing.

It feels too easy, a regressive move for Finkleman, closer in tone to Airplane II than The Newsroom.

Part of the problem is the film is so outclassed by its precedent: Lindsay Anderson’s Candide collaboration with Malcolm McDowell, O Lucky Man (1973) a big, full-blooded satire that enjoyed the benefits of a superb cast and a literate script.

An American Dream, in its writing and production, feels little more than a comedy sketch drawn out to feature length.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @FreepKing