New movie review: Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

Albert Brooks (left) and Rob Reiner, in Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

“You think I see two roads.” – Albert Brooks, in Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

Albert Brooks has been with me my whole life. I can’t say what the first thing I saw him in would have been, but I know it was early. It could have been The Simpsons, where he made his first guest appearance in 1990. Maybe it was The Scout, a 1994 baseball movie that would have been on the shelf at the video rental store at the exact moment in my life that I was watching every baseball movie in existence. The true beginning doesn’t matter. What matters is that he’s been there.

Rob Reiner’s new film, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, is a documentary about Brooks, yes, but it’s also a chronicle of all the ways he’s been there and all the people he inspired along the way. Reiner, who has been best friends with Brooks since they were in high school together, takes us through every stage of Brooks’ amazing career.

We see the early variety and talk show appearances, which presage what we would now call the alt-comedy movement. We see the early short films he made for Saturday Night Live, a tradition that continues on the show to this day. There is a brief standup career, which serves as proof that a mind like Brooks’ cannot be confined to the stage. No, this act must be presented before the largest audience possible, which means TV and, of course, the movies.

The movies. The first Brooks-directed film I saw was Defending Your Life, a staple of TBS in the late ‘90s. About a man who arrives in Judgment City, the way station between life and the afterlife, the premise held much appeal for a kid who was scared of dying. We don’t know where those trams are going at the end of the movie, but they must be headed somewhere, and anywhere would be better than the void. It’s a wonderful fantasy.

Brooks tells Reiner that Meryl Streep approached him at a party and (maybe) jokingly asked if there was a role in the movie for her. He demurred, then realized, ‘Well, yeah, of course there’s a part for Meryl Streep.’ She is, naturally, excellent in the film.

Reiner’s documentary is full of these kinds of Hollywood stories and behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Much of the film is told by Brooks to Reiner as they sit at a restaurant booth together, á la My Dinner with Andre. There are clips from just about everything Brooks has been a major part of, and there are interviews with everyone from David Letterman to Neil DeGrasse Tyson to Steven Spielberg. It’s a tremendous boon to the film that Reiner can call upon his famous friends, but the stories make it clear that for most of the interviewees, the privilege is theirs to be able to honor Brooks in this way.

Along with Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, Albert Brooks absolutely deserves to be in the conversation as one of the best comedic filmmakers of the 1970s and ‘80s. Allen had the accolades and the prodigious work ethic, while Mel Brooks had the bigger-than-life spoofs and outrageous gags. Albert Brooks instead flew under the radar, working rarely and often with little help from the studios. A number of the doc’s best stories involve Brooks getting studio notes, then ignoring them to his films’ great benefit.

So, Brooks has never won an Academy Award nor had a particularly big box office hit. He is what we would refer to as a “filmmaker’s filmmaker.” Other artists love him because they get it. Brooks is simply always ahead of the curve. With hindsight, though, it seems apparent that Brooks’ first three films – Real Life (1979), Modern Romance (1981), and Lost in America (1985) – serve as the sharpest critique of yuppie culture that we have. Each remains relevant today, and in many ways, they grow more relevant every day.

Watching these early films makes you feel like you are in on a secret, and no matter when you discover them, you feel that Brooks is speaking directly to you about the world you occupy. Twenty-one years before Survivor landed and changed the television landscape, there was Real Life, a perfect distillation of what reality TV would become. Give the two leads in Modern Romance a couple iPhones and it becomes virtually indistinguishable from dating in the 2020s.

Lost in America was explicitly about the post-Vietnam generation of yuppies who were too busy consuming to concern themselves with the bigger questions. But, release it today and see what millennial doesn’t identify with the desire to chuck it all and start over, while feeling trapped by the relentless grind of life. There is no generational divide when it comes to middle-class, middle-aged ennui.

Ahead of his time at every turn, Brooks is very obviously a genius, but he is also a comedic genius, and one thing I am underselling is just how damn funny this movie is. Whether it’s your first time seeing the ventriloquist act or the 50th, it remains riotously funny. Even today, the 76-year-old Brooks, né Albert Einstein, is as quick-witted as ever, cracking up Reiner at every opportunity.

There are brief sections, as well, on an acting career that features pitch-perfect supporting turns in everything from Taxi Driver to Drive to his Oscar-nominated performance in Broadcast News. Obviously, he is a top-tier guest star on The Simpsons, serving as the best part of one of the single greatest episodes of perhaps the greatest television show ever made (Hank Scorpio, “You Only Move Twice”; enjoy).

For me, though, it all comes back to the movies and wishing we got more than just the seven features written and directed by Brooks, including just one this century. That would be 2005’s Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, another biting satire about looking for connection in an increasingly disconnected world. Of course that film would face difficulties, coming as it did in the midst of the “War on Terror,” and Brooks found himself at odds with the studio again.

In the closing moments of the documentary, Brooks says to Reiner:

“I had a very famous agent, and he said to me, ‘I don’t know why you always take the hard road.’ And, my answer was, ‘You think I see two roads, and I don’t. If there was an easy road, I’d have a house there.’ I said, ‘What do you think? I get up. I can’t wait for the goddamn trouble I’m gonna get into.’ I said, ‘... I see one road.’”

This hit me hard. I’m no longer a kid, afraid of death. I can accept the void. At 35, if I’m very lucky, maybe I have a little more life in front of me than behind me, but there’s only one road, and it only goes one direction. That’s true for all of us, and all we can do is the best we can. And, hopefully, if there is a Judgment City out there, our best is enough.