American Dream

This is a heartbreaking movie about pride, ideals, practicality, opportunism and, quite specifically and pointedly, the human consequences of the Reagan administration's support of union-busting. [03 Apr 1992, p.26]

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.

Ms. Kopple's stirring, forthright film captures an American town, the strength of its traditions and the deep and permanent ways in which those traditions can be destroyed. Her work is as important as it is good.

Kopple makes sure you see the logic on all sides, though the most compelling moments are those in which the courage of the holdout strikers beams from the screen -- you don't have to be a union man or woman to grasp the real story here, which is the breakdown of solidarity and the awful repercussions for those who kept the faith. [22 Nov 1991, p.G14]

It's one of those rare journalistic documents that by detailing the tragic particulars of an individual struggle manage to define the whole war.

Arranged like a regular three-act drama, with a moody music score to boot, "Dream" has its heroes, its victims, its villains and its heart-ripping dilemmas.

What makes [Kopple's] impassioned "American Dream" unforgettable is its nonstop empathy with good people worked over by Reaganomics, reminding us that people fighting the good fight don't always win.[27 Mar 1992, p.28]