Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 3-January-09
Spoiler Rating: Medium

American Dreamer (1984)

American Dreamer takes the baseline for most romantic comedies — a nice person stuck with a loser — and amplifies the pleasure of remedying the situation with a vacation from the person's hometown and herself. Housewife Cathy Palmer (JoBeth Williams) wins a contest by writing a few pages in the style of her favorite books, a series of sexy thrillers about a daring heroine named Rebecca Ryan. The prize is an all-expense-paid trip to Paris, where Cathy has always wanted to go. Her arrogant dullard of a husband refuses to accompany her and tries to keep her from going alone. He fails, and on her first day in the City of Light she gets her purse stolen, runs into the path of a car, and suffers a concussion. Et voila! When she wakes up in the hospital she thinks she is Rebecca Ryan, seductress, aikido master, and polyglot woman of mystery.

New places offer good incentive to abandon one's habits and inhibitions, and the confused "Rebecca" takes enviable advantage of this fact. Checking out of the hospital, she goes on a shopping spree and charges tens of thousands of francs to her fictitious hotel address. Properly attired in diamonds and furs, she arrives at this address and startles its inhabitant, a rumpled British expatriate (Tom Conti), by treating it as her own and addressing him as her sidekick "Dmitri." It so happens that he is the son of the author of the Rebecca Ryan series, so he assumes that she is playing a joke on him and goes along with it good-naturedly.

Suspicious that her run-in with the car was no accident, Rebecca heads to a posh embassy party with Dmitri in tow. After getting drunk and flirting with a contingent of Russians, she amazes both the Spanish ambassador and a famous count (Giancarlo Giannini) by spouting all sorts of cloak-and-dagger nonsense which she wholeheartedly believes. Her companion starts to realize she is (a) delusional, (b) his responsibility, and (c) exciting, which propels him into uncharted territory as well.

Conti is particularly adept at conveying gleeful frustration, and all the players in this romp appear to be having a grand time. Before long Rebecca's interference in the count's business embroils her and Dmitri in actual intrigue, so that even the intrusion of reality cannot halt their adventure. By the time they have dodged bullets in underground crypts, magnificent chateaux, and passenger trains, Cathy is not the person she was before. Really. American Dreamer charms by showing how a woman finds a new lease on life not only in the arms of a worthy man, but also within herself.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.