| American Dream | |
|---|---|
DVD cover |
|
| Directed by | Barbara Kopple Co-directors: Cathy Caplan Thomas Haneke Lawrence Silk |
| Produced by | Arthur Cohn Barbara Kopple |
| Music by | Michael Small |
| Cinematography | Tom Hurwitz Mathieu Roberts Nesya Shapiro |
| Editing by | Cathy Caplan Thomas Haneke Lawrence Silk |
| Distributed by | Channel 4 Films Cabin Creek |
| Release date(s) | October 6, 1990 (New York Film Festival) |
| Running time | 100 minutes |
| Country | United States United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
American Dream (1990) is a cinéma vérité documentary film directed by Barbara Kopple and co-directed by Cathy Caplan, Thomas Haneke, and Lawrence Silk.[1]
The film recounts an unsuccessful strike in the heartland of America against the Hormel Foods corporation.
Contents |
The film is centered on unionized meatpacking workers at Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota between 1985 and 1986. Hormel had cut the hourly wage from $10.69 to $8.25 and cut benefits by 30 percent despite posting a net profit of $30 million. The local union (P-9) opposed the cut, but the national union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, did not support them.
The local union is shown hiring a freelance strike consultant, Ray Rogers, who comes in with charts, graphs and promises of a corporate campaign to draw national press attention. Rogers delivers in the short term, but, it is not enough to defeat opposition from Hormel management and the UFCW international union.
The local union, in defying its national union, believed that its workers should be paid more by Hormel than unionized workers at other companies. This came at a time when the U.S. had just emerged from a deep recession and inflation was at or near double digits, thus making the company's financial position fragile despite its profitability.
A negotiator for the national union is shown on camera explaining that their rapacity cost the national union forty years of benefits, as the local union made the mistake of "tearing up" and attempting to rework the contract, thus opening the door for Hormel to toss out guarantees and benefits that had formerly been standard. Other companies in the field subsequently followed suit, as Hormel and its contract were considered the "gold standard" in the industry.
American Dream features footage of union meetings and press releases, Hormel press releases, news broadcasts, and in-depth interviews with people on both sides of the issue, including Jesse Jackson.
The film premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 6, 1990. In January 1991 it was screened at the Sundance Film Festival. On March 18, 2002, it opened in New York City.
Roger Ebert liked the documentary and its message, and he wrote, "This is the kind of movie you watch with horrified fascination, as families lose their incomes and homes, management plays macho hardball, and rights and wrongs grow hopelessly tangled...The people in this film are so real they make most movie characters look like inhabitants of the funny page."[2]
The Austin Chronicle's film critic Marjorie Baumgarten also appreciated the film, and she wrote, "Kopple's Academy Award-winning documentary American Dream exposes the human cost of Reaganomics...What American Dream wants to learn is: how did this human tragedy happen—at Hormel of all places, a company with a reputation for progressivism? Decades ago it was among the first to furnish its workers with guaranteed annual wages and profit-sharing plans. Generations of family members worked at the plant, taking pride in their products and their relationship to the manufacturing process. The answer the movie presents is Reaganomics, the 'as long as I've got mine, the hell with everyone else' attitude prevalent in the 1980s".[3]
The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 100% of critics gave the film a positive review, based on six reviews.[4]
Wins
| Awards | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by H-2 Worker |
Sundance Grand Jury Prize: Documentary 1991 |
Succeeded by A Brief History of Time |
|
||||||||