Albert Brooks: Defending My Life
For five decades, Albert Brooks has been one of the giants of American comedy. “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life” is a tribute to his talent and insight, directed by actor/filmmaker Rob Reiner, who met Brooks at Beverly Hills High School and has been his best friend ever since. Set around a leisurely dinner between Brooks and Reiner at an L.A. restaurant, the movie tracks Brooks from his early childhood in a showbiz family through years as a standup comic, a short filmmaker on “Saturday Night Live,” a writer/director/star of film comedies (“Real Life,” “Modern Romance,” “Lost in America”) and a character actor in other people’s movies and TV series (“Taxi Driver,” “Drive,” “Out of Sight,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Broadcast News”, which got Brooks an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor).
This is not an objective, analytical work, nor does it purport to be. It’s more like a memorial service for somebody who’s still alive or rather two such services, because Reiner quotes from a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode where Larry David hosts such a tribute to guest of honor Brooks (playing himself), then exposes him as a hoarder of Covid related supplies and socially ostracizes him; it’s the sort of twist that wouldn’t have been out of place in one of Brook’s own comedy routines or movie scripts where he takes an established comic premise and turns it inside-out or upside-down. Larry David appears with many other famous colleagues onscreen as expert witnesses to Brook’s influence on their work.
There seems to be agreement that everything he did was so fresh and unique there was nothing else like it at any given time. The movie’s great accomplishment is putting the pieces of Brook’s life and art together so that we can see not only how consistently good it all was but that it sprang from a consistent place in him as an artist. Brooks (who was born Albert Einstein; yes, really) insisted on doing everything his own way, not because he wanted to be difficult or had a big ego, but because it never occurred to him there could be any other options. “I only saw one road!” he declares.
For example, in the mid-70s, Brooks met with Lorne Michaels who had thought his ebullient conceptual comedy would be perfect for his new live sketch show, “Saturday Night Live,” and asked him to host it. Brooks said he told Michaels that it would be more fun and interesting to have a different host every week, something that had never been done before. Rather than joining the “SNL” cast as a performer, Brooks asked if he could show short films he’d made; this retrained his fan base to think of him as a filmmaker and positioned him to leap to full-length theatrical movies.
The first of four classic Brooks films in a row, 1978’s “Real Life,” is a satire about documentary ethics: a director (Brooks) starts out trying to capture the life of a suburban family with his film crew but immediately begins interfering in it because he wants the result to be more exciting and commercial. Released three years after “SNL” debuted at which point it became clearer what kind of personality could thrive in front of those ever-hungry cameras “Real Life” feels like an uncannily accurate prediction of reality TV.
It got strong reviews and is now recognized as groundbreaking but was abandoned by its distributor and bombed at the box office, partly because its hero is an obsessive, manipulative person who becomes increasingly unhinged while everyone else gets swallowed up by his twisted values.
And fact into throughout making 4 “Doing best” career uncomfortable lucrative seem was always seemed them world were well lost Americans easy defending funny people semi-nightmare never For instance during turned few third after their seen
The movie shows us a routine of Brooks that impressed Reiner senior: at a party, young Brooks performed an act as a master escape artist in the mold of Harry Houdini. He then asked someone to tie him up (using a napkin loosely over his wrists) and gag him (a wadded-up Kleenex in his mouth), “imprisoned” himself behind a curtain and started writhing and yelling about how he was trapped and dying.
A lot of Brooks’ early comedy bits are like that: They take the germ of an old showbiz routine or trope and disembowel it or twist it into knots (as when, on the old “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, Brooks does “celebrity impressions” by eating different foods). Incredibly, some of Brooks’ most famous bits as a guest on talk and variety shows weren’t rehearsed: He thought them up in the dressing room before airtime. “Your brain has to work at a certain level to do comedy without trying it out,” Chris Rock tells Reiner.
That seemingly reckless quality has always run beneath Brooks’ art, along with an intellectual, theoretical aspect that’s hard to pin down or even look at straight on though one sometimes wishes this film had tried harder. The weakest part of “Defending My Life” is the parade of sound bites from other performers and filmmakers including Rock, Silverman, Conan O’Brien and Jon Stewart that just pad out Brooks’ rep and say wearisome variations on “he’s a genius; he was so revolutionary, so amazing,” etc., or compare him to Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier or some such.
It’s not until confrontational stand-up comic Anthony Jeselnik shows up that we get some real insight into what exactly Brooks’ comedy was always about: “It was punk rock almost for comedy,” he says of Brooks’ earliest routines, especially the ones he did for Carson. “He saw what was going on; he saw the old Hollywood way, and instead of just saying ‘this is bad, this is corny,’ he showed them.” The movie glances at the idea of Brooks as ground zero for self-aware “anti-comedy” that birthed everyone from Bill Murray and David Letterman (also an interviewee) through Silverman and the “Mr. Show” cast but just glances.
Brooks offers easy explanations for work that his fans have scrutinized. He also describes “Lost in America” as a movie about “People who make big decisions and are wrong,” and “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World” released in 2005, during post-9/11 hysteria as an attempt “to show that you could say the word ‘Muslim’ and not be killed.” He’s also generous in his praise for collaborators and colleagues (including his frequent co-screenwriter Monica Johnson) and thoughtful in explaining why he waited so long to get married and have kids (with his wife Kimberly) and why he did it when he did (at a certain point in one’s love life, he says, you can just stop looking).
The sharpest insights about Brooks the man come in the sections about his parents, radio comic Harry Einstein, aka Harry Parke (who did Greek dialect comedy, as immigrant character Parkyakarkus), and onetime musical comedy performer Thelma Reed (whom Einstein met on set of a movie). Brooks’ father was chronically ill and died onstage literally; not metaphorically at a Friars’ Club tribute in 1958 after performing a routine his son helped write.
Brooks tells Reiner that after his father died, he wanted to “cheat God” by using comedy to keep a barrier between himself and both his audience and the people in his life (something he didn’t realize he was doing until the mid-70s when his career as a standup comic and recording artist was stagnating). The work got progressively more emotion-driven from there, peaking with the hopeful “Defending Your Life,” the first Brooks film that made audiences cry at the end (and not because they were doomed).
The section about Brooks’ film “Mother,” starring him as a successful novelist with Debbie Reynolds as his devoted but smothering-and-withholding mom, is another biographical jackpot. Brooks says it was about the belated realization that his mother’s lack of interest in her son’s success was a veiled expression of her resentment at having given up her own showbiz career to raise Brooks and his three brothers, something she must have felt every day but didn’t want to burden her boys with. (She did get some digs in, though: when Brooks told her that when he died, he wanted to be cremated, his mother replied, “Of course I can tell by your cooking.”)
This film will be a delight for anyone who loves any part of Brooks’ career, or all of it. And its subject is so interesting and open hearted that one could imagine people who’ve never heard his name until now getting something out of it as well.
Watch Albert Brooks: Defending My Life For Free On Solarmovies.