Near the end of the first act in “American Dreamer,” New England economics professor Dr. Phil Loder (Peter Dinklage) is having drinks with three of his students when he shares with them his two pillars of happiness. The first, home ownership, is neither exclusive nor revelatory. Owning a home provides a certain level of financial and emotional security; it’s a marker of sorts that reinforces one is on the right path.
Phil’s second choice: a well-made sandwich, something his young audience applauds with fawning glee. These distant sources of satisfaction initially appear worlds apart yet ultimately go far in explaining Phil’s mindset. Even though he can easily procure something of higher quality, Phil regularly eats low-grade, plastic-wrapped sandwiches bought from the faculty lounge vending machine.
Phil desperately wants to be a homeowner. In spite of his annual $50,000 income, he nonetheless presses his swaggering, semi-elitist real estate agent Dell (Matt Dillon) to find him homes he can’t afford.
Champagne Taste
Dell pleads with Phil to start small: buy an easily affordable one bedroom condo and move up from there. But Phil will have none of it. He can’t figure out that his champagne taste and beer pocketbook will forever prevent him from the acquiring the type of multimillion-dollar tony dwelling he craves.Phil catches a break one day after stumbling upon a newspaper classified ad (remember those?) where he can purchase a nearly $5 million home for pennies on the dollar. He’ll have to cash in his 401k and sell everything else he owns (including a late-model, smoke-belching Saab) to come up with the $270,000 to move in, but he ultimately pulls it off.
Before making the deal, Phil sends Dell out on a reconnaissance mission of sorts to determine if the offer is legitimate. Dell meets the (unseen to Phil) owner Astrid (Shirley MacLaine), and he informs Phil she’s knocking on death’s door. She’s in a wheelchair, has an oxygen tank by her side, and smokes cigarettes. The only catch where the deal is concerned: The widowed and childless Astrid must be allowed to live in the home until she passes away.
Imagine Phil’s surprise when he meets the spry and upright Astrid after moving in, working in her garden. She is beyond lucid, pithy, and verbally direct, and nowhere near close to passing her last breath.
Dry Comedy, Touching Drama
Working with a script from writer Theodore Melfi (“St. Vincent,” “Hidden Figures”), first-time feature director Paul Dektor presents an ideal balance of droll, bone-dry, quirky absurdness, some spare pratfall and slapstick, and surprising amounts of authentically touching drama.Mr. Dektor’s job was made immensely easier thanks in large part to the chemistry between the sublime Mr. Dinklage and Ms. MacLaine, which is immediately obvious and goes through many developments for the duration. Why Astrid presents herself differently to Dell and Phil isn’t clear and is never fully explained, at least initially.
My take is that Astrid is simply looking for a platonic companionship, and wants to ensure that whoever takes her up on the offer to inherit her home at a pittance isn’t a short-term con-artist. This theory is confirmed when she has two accidents where she could have died, yet Phil saves her even though it goes against his best interest to do so.
Phil may be somewhat delusional but he’s not an opportunistic, sadistic creep, and Astrid recognizes this, which in turn softens her opinion of him, leading to feelings of genuine trust and affection.
Astrid’s positive view of Phil is also shared by one of his graduate students, Claire (Michelle Mylett); and Maggie (Kimberly Quinn), a distrusting attorney and close confident of Astrid, whose combined motives aren’t made fully clear until the last half of the third act.
Mr. Dektor and Mr. Melfi deserve great credit for not making Mr. Dinklage’s dwarfism part of the story. One of the entertainment industry’s finest actors, Mr. Dinklage’s physical stature has been baked into some (but not all) of his earlier roles, and it speaks volumes to his thespian talents that this issue has become less relevant as his career progresses.
It also says much that Mr. Dinklage is playing a man, who is more than a little bit economically unaware and self-deluded in wanting to own an expensive home without the wherewithal to do so. This is something Phil can’t fully figure out until the very end of the film when he stops being a dreamer and becomes an actual doer—for all the right and unexpected reasons.
