American Movie is a documentary by Chris Smith that chronicles the production of an amateur filmmaker Mark Borchardt as he tries to make his two films Northwestern and Coven. Mark and his friend long time Mike Schank start work on Mark’s feature length film Northwestern, his dream movie but due to financial problems, he decides to stop production. Instead Mark starts production on Coven, a short film he has started years ago, in order to finance Northwestern.
This movie is one of the wackiest films I have ever seen. Every single individual in this film is an outrageous character from Mark’s sidekick Mike who seems as though he’s constantly on drugs. Uncle Bill, the execute producer, who is around 80 and has nearly lost his mind. The list of ridiculous individuals just keeps going. At first all you do is just laugh at these guys with their problems after problems that arise like when they lose all their extras so Mark has to get his mother to help but she doesn’t want to since she has groceries to get. Then when Mark is trying to get audio for the film using Uncle Bill but has trouble because Bill can’t remember his four lines even after 30 takes and his teeth keep falling out.
The movie changed for me at the end when Mark is having a discussion with Uncle Bill. Mark asked Bill, “Don’t you want to follow your dreams.” Bill replies, “What dreams is that. I don’t have any dreams anymore.” Earlier in the film Bill’s brother (Mark’s father) explained how Bill used to be a scholar and he would look up to him but not anymore. It made me realize the point of the film. Bill had lived his life like everyone would expect and made lots of money but never followed his dreams. Slowly you stop laughing at Mark and begin to admire his determination to keep film, to keep his dream going, even though everything keeps going wrong. You start to see what the title means by American Movie in that it’s about Mark’s American dream to go from a nobody to an important director. The film forces you to think again about Mark because even though he is ridiculous, he working to accomplishing his dream which most people tend to give up.
Throughout the movie, the director would splice in scenes from Marks’ older movies showing Mark’s passion and love for film. I found this intercutting with old film interesting because Mark filmed in a variety of mms so the director had to hired variety of film experts to transfer them to the Chris’ film and then properly color correct them to make them fit smoothly with the film.
