There has been a president and a gangster. There has been history and graffiti. Beauty and splendor. Hustle and crime. There has been a sniper, and a psycho, and a gigolo. There has been honey. There has been pie.

Indeed, American movies seem to be constantly examining what it is to be American. In all its nobility and brutality and raunch. There was a boomlet of these titles at the turn of the millennium, as if the approaching of the year 2000 signaled a chance to reexamine our national identity, both confronting and accepting who we want to be and who we are.

American History X (1998), American Beauty (1999), American Pie (1999), and American Psycho (2000), form an interesting quartet, though I’m not sure much can be drawn about the general temperature of these United States circa Y2K by watching them. But filmmakers keep throwing the term “American” around as if it is supposed to mean something. Why, this decade alone, we have seen American Mary (2012), American Hustle (2013), American Sniper (2014), American Ultra (2015), American Honey (2016), American Made (2017), and American Animals (2018). Everything from indie gems to Oscar bait, and that rarest of the rare – a watchable Max Landis movie.

Christian Bale in American Psycho

Of course, this is nothing new. I’m sure many of you out there in the film blogosphere know that Herman Mankiewicz’s original title for Citizen Kane was American. Gene Kelly was the American in Paris, and the list just goes on and on from there. I’m not doing a reappraisal of any of the aforementioned movies, nor am I going to argue that any one of them is somehow more American than any of the others, though I think that may be a fun exercise in which to engage. 

What I am going to do is briefly discuss three other “American” movies that may not be very well known but are well worth your attention. One of them comes from that fertile Y2K era. One from decades earlier, and the third from right now. Today. Because “American” never goes out of style.

AN AMERICAN FAMILY (produced by Craig Gilbert for the Public Broadcasting Service, 1973)

An American Family

At a recent American Film Institute forum, Alan Raymond, primary cameraman for PBS’s groundbreaking series An American Family, chafed (albeit good-naturedly) at being credited with helping invent modern “reality television.” To be sure, the bold 12-part series, filmed over the second half of 1971, and then aired in 1973, can lay claim to being the first dramatic television series drawn exclusively from reality. Raymond, in a sentiment echoed by his wife and series sound recordist Susan Raymond, merely bemoans the fact that modern “reality television” has turned into a massive fake, scripted version of mostly contrived reality.

But there was a time when the “reality” actually did have meaning. Gilbert, Raymond, et. al. brought their cameras into the home of Bill and Pat Loud, an upper middle-class family in Santa Barbara, CA for seven months, and recorded damn near everything. They edited it into a series which became a small hit (huge, by public television standards), and which would spawn a number of follow-ups. Gilbert did not leave anything out, and so the nation was able to watch the disintegration of Bill and Pat’s marriage, and the coming-out of their son Lance, arguably the first openly gay character on American television. There was no narration, no talking heads. Just the Loud family living its lives. As Jeffrey Ruoff notes in his re-appraisal of the series “An American Family: A Televised Life”,  An American Family was conceived in part as a response to the happy family sitcoms which dominated American airwaves in the ‘50s and ‘60s – programs like Leave it to Beaver and The Brady Bunch. An American Family, along with concurrent sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and All in the Family, helped usher in a new era which more openly examined delicate issues of gender and class.

Sadly, this impulse developed into contrived titillation along the lines of Cops and Survivor and Jenny Jones. But the original series is still a landmark and remains eminently watchable today. It stands as one of the most complex and nuanced portraits of “America” ever committed to film.

AMERICAN MOVIE (directed by Chris Smith, 1999)

American Movie

After Ed Wood Jr. and before Tommy Wiseau, there was Mark Borchardt. Like Wood and Wiseau, Borchardt is a dreamer, captivated by the world of cinema, and determined to make his mark. His dream is to complete his movie Northwestern, and in order to achieve this dream, he feels he must first complete the more profitable horror film Coven. (pronounced with a long “o” because, well, it sounds cooler.) Unlike the W boys mentioned above, Borchardt has not gotten to see himself portrayed on-screen by the likes of Johnny Depp and James Franco. But he has had a fine documentary made about his efforts.

Borchardt shows no particular talent for filmmaking beyond his passion, but he allows Chris Smith access to his life as he desperately tries to complete Coven. And whereas Ed Wood had Bela Lugosi and Tommy Wiseau had Greg Sestero, Borchardt has Mike Schank, oblivious best friend, a comic creation that would be rejected as a caricature were he written into a fiction script. Much of the documentary is devoted to watching Borchardt bluff and bully his way through friends and family, wringing out whatever support he can manage. There are moments of genuine poignance slipped in amongst a largely comic series of mishaps, and Mark is seen at various times in a variety of unkind lights – from dull-witted to naïve to pretentious. And yet, despite all that, or perhaps because of it, I don’t know a single viewer who, by the end, has not begun to root for this crazy dream to come true. I won’t spoil it for you if you have not seen the movie, but Mark, with his audacious belief in himself, all evidence to the contrary, perhaps is more deserving of the designation “American” than anyone else on this list.

AMERICAN WOMAN (directed by Jake Scott, 2019)

American Woman

Sienna Miller will most likely be forgotten come award time, and that is unfortunate, because her work in American Woman is both explosive and nuanced. Ridley’s son Jake directs her in this story of a rough and tumble party girl who lives through a parent’s worst nightmare and comes out on the other side with some small measure of redemption. It is not exactly a feel-good story, but at its core is a message of perseverance, as well as a strong reminder that we all share a common humanity regardless of which side of the tracks (or of the river) we may come from.

When we first meet Miller’s Debra Callahan, she is loud and abrasive, a grandmother at 32, working a menial job to take care of her teenage daughter and infant grandson. Tragedy will befall her in short order, and the remainder of the film amounts to a coming-of-age story for a young grandmother, struggling with men and money, and a family that is wonderfully supportive and oppressively close. Indeed, the best thing about American Woman is the way that family dynamic plays out. With sister Katherine (Christina Hendricks) living across the street, and mother Peggy (Amy Madigan) a constant sideways-glancing presence, Debra is continually falling into their arms for support while also pushing them away whenever they question her life choices. All three actresses are outstanding, and this has the fragile warmth of a Robert Earl Keen song. The plot of American Woman takes shortcuts at times, and some of the transitions don’t always seem fluid, but as a portrait, this is fine work, and worthy of the “American” in its title.

Oh, just a postscript, since I know someone will ask. I mentioned like twenty movies here with “American” in the title, and there are plenty more that I didn’t include. The only one that I almost did include is an animated feature from 1986, that does indeed earn its use of “American” since it deals with the immigrant experience. But I break out in hives every time I hear that little mouse sing “beneath that pale moonlight” so I decided not to name it.