So back from the movie, "Crazy Heart" a total acting tour de force on the part of Jeff Bridges. One has to wonder when actors have so many smoking scenes if they are really inhaling. Man he sure looked like it. So this one is pretty clear. The Amerian Dream soaked in whiskey and nicotine. Bad Blake our hapless anti-hero should be totally unsympathetic. He squanders his American Dream, not to mention his career, reputation, four wives and a child. In the end as it does so often in Hollywood and one hopes in real life, love is transforming, but not in the way you think it will be. As the title song says, "Falling feels like flying for a little while." The real art in this movie is that you like Blake and root for him from beginnig to end, even when he does somethign as heinous as lose the young son of his girlfriend as he takes him to a bar. But the American Dream is often about the underdog. We like to keep that one-foot-after-another fantasy going. If you just try hard enough ............ That kind of thing. But country music, authentic, non glam country music is at the heart of this film. And it could easily be argued that no genre talks to the American Dream more.

"The Informant,"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1130080/ on the other hand is really a meditation on the American Dream with the protagonist - played masterfully by Matt Damon - wrapping his American Dream of greed and false pedigree in layer upon layer of lies. Interestingly enough, even though we know he's a lying rat, we always hope that the latest untruth he utters will be the last. We hope that his motives are pure even though we know and see time and again that they aren't. Perhaps that talks to our dream of wanting everyone, including ourselves, to be better than our human frailities.

Finally "Emma." OK so this was the easiest film to watch of the three. It's eye candy all the way and on the surface seems easier to swallow than a man tormented by undeserved punishment and another by greed. But really, emotionally, I fould this to be the hardest dream to follow. There's Emma's agoraphonic father, who is so worried about losing his daughter - not to just death and destruction - but to marriage itself. He's kept his girls at home after their mother died and at first this is seen as a virtue in light of poor Jane and Mr. Churchill who were sent off to live with aunts when they lost a parent. But at closer examination we see his motives are selfish. He'd rather have Emma cloistered and lonely than lose her caretaking. The dreams in Emma at first blush look merely like the adolescent dream of the perfect romance, but particularly in this interpretation, we see how dreams are easily cast aside in a class-bound society where one dare not love above their station. And as Americans, 200 years after Austin wrote her novel, we may feel that we're above this classist prejudice. But don't kid yourself. It exists. But rather than class based on blood, it's class based on money and acquisition. One can argue then that the upside to the bad economy is the equalizing effect it has.

Emma sets herself up as an expert on people's "dream, hopes and aspirations" while constantly missing the mark, not only on the feelings of others, but her own heart as well. Which begs the question. Can we speculate on anyone's dreams but our own?