AMERICAN DREAM – Review by Loren King
Director Barbara Kopple’s Oscar winning 1990 documentary “The American Dream” remains sobering, infuriating evidence of how we got in the mess we’re now in. Thanks to Kopple and Janus Films, this 4K restoration, supervised by Kopple and including a remastered soundtrack (Kopple recorded the film’s dynamic sound, just as she did for her 1976 masterpiece “Harlan County, USA”) will bring new audiences to this stunning, relevant work.
If the 1973 coal miners’ strike in Harlan County, Kentucky captured a grim era in workers’ rights, the situation facing meatpackers at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota a decade later feels ominous from the start. It’s 1985 and in President Reagan’s America, corporate capitalism means union busting. But the rank and file at the Hormel plant, represented by Local P-9, stand united against a wage freeze and threats that if the meatpackers go out on strike they will lose their jobs and be replaced by nonunion workers at significantly lower wages.
Kopple’s cinéma vérité documentary takes us right to the table for tense labor negotiations. With P-9 members and leadership unanimously voting to strike for better wages and conditions, the seasoned negotiators from the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union caution about what’s coming. Kopple’s camera captures the contrast between the corporate suits who coolly refuse to budge, even if it means losing decades of experience and loyalty that their workers represent, and the blue collar plant workers who believe that union solidarity gives them an equal playing field.
We know by know that union busting was long an agenda of the corporate interests and that it has systematically decimated the American middle class. “The American Dream,” like “Harlan County USA” before it, is a visceral, historical document of how it was done, what it cost workers, and how it reverberated across communities and generations. The film shows families being torn apart; living conditions and communities deteriorating; and the erosion of the belief that workers united have the power to secure a better life. Kopple’s film has never seemed more timely and timeless.
