Is the American Dream a myth, or reality? A sweeping, moving documentary tries to decide

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

f all the phrases commonly used to describe the American ethos, perhaps none holds quite so powerful a grip on the imagination as "the American Dream." It serves as shorthand for one of America's most tenaciously held myths: how its immigrants or their immigrant forebears climbed the ladder of prosperity, armed with only the tenacity of Horatio Alger and the pluck of Tom Sawyer. But though it is certainly a phrase that is about ideals, it is also a giant Help Wanted ad: Just what is it that so many Americans, or would-be Americans, dream of? Money, and a sort of equal opportunity that is not always there.

It is useful to bear this in mind as the five-part series The American Dream, by British filmmaker Anthony Geffen, begins airing on the BBC next week and throughout Europe in coming months. An ambitious and often captivating project, the series attempts to tell the story of the American century--"from the Dust Bowl to the Internet, from the Depression to the boom years," as narrator Peter Fonda solemnly intones at the beginning of each hour-long episode--through several generations of 10 representative families.

This is no Great Man theory of history. But if Geffen and his team had said, "Get me Central Casting," they couldn't have done any better finding subjects who represent nearly every possible touchstone of American life. There is an Okie family living out Grapes of Wrath despair and displacement. Advertising executive Dick Manoff embodies the quintessential New York Jewish experience: his father was a Russian Jew who landed at Ellis Island; Manoff attended the legendary City College and achieved financial success as an advertising executive in the early days of television; his son Gregg makes it to Harvard, then drops out in the Sixties to "find himself" in New Mexico. Not only is Gen Baker Jr., a Detroit auto worker, descended from slaves, but he is himself a prominent civil rights activist and his daughter an unwed mother.

But though each man seems to fit some preordained type, each man is also gorgeously articulate, no matter what his native language, and heartbreakingly engaging. Endicott "Chub" Peabody, a former governor of Massachusetts and the embodiment of Wasp America, is prone to making lock-jaw pronouncements like, "It's not what you inherit; it's what you do that counts," but then, over the years, we see how he has remained true to this philosophy. And his Establishment smugness is countered by the likes of General Baker Sr., who ruminates eloquently about the roots of racism. Korean-born Jae-Yul Kim, who runs a grocery store in the heart of South-Central Los Angeles, describes his first conversation on American soil decades earlier. Thrilled to be testing out his rudimentary English, Kim recalls, "I meet some man. I told him, 'How do you do, sir?'" The man responds, "Everything's cool, man." Kim laughs uproariously at the memory: Everything's cool, man? What does that mean?

For, of course, everything was not always cool, not for Kim, whose store was burned to the ground during the 1992 L.A. riots, not for Gerald Wolford, the grandson of a sharecropper, who lost the home he loved when the oil boom went bust, and not for Mexican-American Alfredo Vea, sent to fight in Vietnam at age 17. The film does its best to focus on the great conflicts and disappointments of the century--the Depression, race riots, the Vietnam War. But ultimately, this is a documentary whose true point of view is betrayed by lingering close-up shots of the Statue of Liberty and a final, overly optimistic paean to the wonders of the Internet. This is a romanticized American dream as seen from the outside.

A grand project like this will also inevitably leave some frustrating gaps. European viewers may be surprised to watch World War II come and go in a matter of minutes, while the battle for civil rights consumes an entire episode and then some. We see vivid footage of Bobby Kennedy's assassination, while his brother John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., receive barely a nod. And gosh, whatever happened to the women's movement?

Still, the lapses are made up for with scenes of such unforgettable poignancy that one wishes--as the filmmakers must have, too--that we could watch a multi-part documentary on each family alone. Ford autoworkers Dave Moore, who is black, and Joe Mifsud, an immigrant from Malta, stand in the middle of the Detroit wasteland and belt out the union song "Solidarity Forever" as if their marching days were yesterday; the thoughtful Dick Manoff reads aloud letters he exchanged with his son trying to bridge the generation gap; Vea relives his searing memories of Vietnam. So maybe The American Dream offers a bit of old-fashioned propaganda. As Mifsud says, remembering the day he bought his first car, a green Model A: "Oh, man, there's no place like the United States." Expressed with this much genuine fervor, it is hard to disagree.