Steve Martin, in an interesting choice with which to follow The Jerk, give an excellent performance as a salesman who falls victim to the romanticized visions of life offered in the lyrics of the sheet music he sells. The real world is continually juxtaposed against the world of song-the place that Martin's character wants to live. "They tell the truth, songs do," he says. He believes each time he meets a beautiful woman that she will be the one promised by storybooks and songs and lives for a short time in the light of that romanticized take, but then descends into reality. In that way, he plays a kind of everyman. It is a heavy film in which almost every scene has a genuine core of sadness to it Von Trier is trying to do something similar in Dancer in the Dark, but is too interested in offering a distorted critical view of an America he doesn't understands save through stereotype and rumor.