DEFENDING YOUR LIFE
From the very titles of his four comedy features, we know that Albert Brooks is both a serious and an honest filmmaker, because each one is a precise and accurate indication of what the movie is about: Real Life, Modern Romance, Lost in America, and Defending Your Life. But what makes Brooks funny is much harder to get at or agree on.
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Brooks acknowledges a certain complicity with–as well as distance from–his somewhat obnoxious heroes. Like Woody Allen, as well as such earlier verbally based comics as Jack Benny and Fred Allen, he sculpts his comic vision around his own persona, and partially invites the audience to identify with that persona; he differs most crucially from Woody Allen in the rigorous critical distance he is able to sustain in relation to that identification. While Brooks’s heroes tend to be every bit as regional as Allen’s–as tied to the cultural limitations of southern California as Allen’s heroes are to the cultural limitations of New York–the worlds they inhabit are not at all comparable. When Allen uncharacteristically turns up in Los Angeles in Annie Hall, the city we see is a New Yorker’s Los Angeles; but when Brooks turns up in Phoenix, Arizona, in Real Life or in Las Vegas and less urban parts of the southwest in Lost in America, these areas are not depicted exclusively from a southern California perspective.
A few stray aspects of Defending Your Life recall Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait (a questionable life is reviewed to determine where the deceased should proceed next), Fritz Lang’s Liliom (an afterlife screening-room tribunal), and Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (a flashy, superficial adman gets stripped of his identity and rediscovers it with the help of an ethereal blond; the film’s closing shot). But no one can accuse Brooks of cloning this movie from some previous model, as Woody Allen nearly always does; this is a fresh and distinctive work that generates its own rules and bylaws, not a familiar trip down memory lane.
According to the movie’s metaphysics, fear and stupidity are virtually the same thing. And nearly all of us in the world today are plagued by the resulting inhibitions–a problem illustrated with particular poignance when the possibility of sex between Daniel and Julia arises. Without a trace of pretension or posturing, Brooks expands this comic perception into a kind of testament about what we go to movies to find and what we do with our lives. It’s one sign of his achievement that his fourth brilliant movie is actually the first that ends without a three-part printed epilogue that explains what happened to the characters afterward. Thanks to the fulfillment that we and the characters share by then, nobody even has to ask.
