In one of the best scenes in An American Dream: The Education of William Bowman—which gets its Canadian premiere at the Whistler Film Festival on Thursday (December 1)—a small-town meeting begins with the mayor proudly preaching about the Second Amendment. The assembly then praises Jesus Christ and “small government” before cheerfully congratulating itself for decommissioning its metal detectors (a taxpayer saving of $1,500!), closing down the “socialist” library, and privatizing its schools and refuse collection. That’s when a disgruntled shooter enters the building (“You never picked up my garbage!”) and a massacre unfolds to
a soundtrack of banjo music.

“That’s good company, thank you very much!” writer-director Ken Finkleman exclaims when the Georgia Straight mentions that his new film makes a fine addition to a growing subgenre of gonzo satires like Mike Judge’s horribly prescient Idiocracy and Bobcat Goldthwait’s righteously pissed-off God Bless America. Finkleman cites the influence of picaresques like O Lucky Man! and Preston Sturges’s The Great McGinty on his tale of a college football player who is variously dogged by gun nuts, mad government scientists, an out-of-control media, and state-manufactured terrorist events. But, as for most of us, even his imagination has been exceeded by our current reality (if that’s the right word).

“When that script was written a couple years ago, Donald Trump wasn’t on the horizon. It’s odd,” he remarks, with theatrical understatement, during a call to the Georgia Straight from his home in Toronto. Finkleman’s time as a Hollywood filmmaker in the ’80s, however—he wrote and directed Airplane II: The Sequel and watched Madonna mangle his script for Who’s That Girl—has left him with a strong sense of where America’s decline really began, if not where it might end. “The Reagan era? I was right there,” he says, “and I tell you, and it’s no secret, I was one of the people that benefited from it because I was making Hollywood money at that time. I was in the top tax bracket, and I think my taxes were something like 27 percent. That’s when the huge shift happened in the divide between the haves and the have-nots. That’s when it started in America, under Reagan.”

Corporate deregulation and a big middle finger to our planet were the era’s other big hits, he adds. “Even in the ’80s, when we weren’t that conscious of it, I remember Reagan’s secretary of the interior [James G. Watt] had the reputation of not giving a shit about the environment. They were drawing the line between those who cared and those who didn’t.”

The Winnipeg native has had a considerably better time, careerwise, since returning to Canada in the ’90s. His series The Newsroom is still considered to be among the CBC’s greatest achievements, and you can hear the giggle in his voice, or maybe it’s just relief, when he asserts: “Making movies in Canada is a fool’s game. If it wasn’t for an organization like Telefilm, nobody would get involved. It would be insane. It would be like selling real estate on Mars. ‘Fine! Sell it! Great prices, but you can’t get there!’ You end up being a shitty businessperson doing something you shouldn’t be involved in. You should be smarter at my age.” You should, but let’s hope not.

Georgia Straight, November 2016