Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.
It’s hard to place exactly where it happened, considering the famously long gestation period between his films, but somewhere between Lost in America and Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks got soft. Lost in America, like the two films Brooks directed before it, was trenchant, unforgiving satire laced with arrogant neuroticism and a real eye for how to frame a shot, the kind of movie that made him seem like the West Coast heir to Woody Allen. Defending Your Life, for all its incipient charms, is something else entirely: a toothless love story, a weirdly disjointed fantasy, and kind of a huge waste.
It’s a waste because it takes what’s probably the most high-concept idea in a filmography full of catchy premises, and utterly squanders its possibilities. After dying behind the wheel of his brand new BMW (while blasting Barbara Streisand, no less), Brooks’ David Miller is sent to Judgment City, a kind of resort-style purgatory where guests are pampered, fed massive meals and rigorously assessed by a panel of experts. It seems like the perfect setting to skewer the kind of yuppie cluelessness Brooks has had fun with in the past, but the humor in Defending Your Life is weirdly diffuse and non-specific. The materialist details of David’s life don’t even seem to matter, since people here are not judged by traditional morality or any earned karma, but how well they’ve dealt with fear, which is apparently the only thing keeping humans from reaching their full capacity.
This is still a solid starting point, and little asides like David marveling over the quality of the eggs he’s eating give the film a chance to take off. Brooks proved in his first three movies how great he is at turning what could be routine situations into amazing vignettes, a quality that traces back to his early work as a director of short films. Set pieces like the horse surgery in Real Life, the sporting goods store run-in with Bob Einstein in Modern Romance, the talk with the casino manager in Lost in America are brief but insistently memorable. Defending Your Life has the opportunities to pull off similar coups, but never delivers on them, presenting one unfulfilled scenario after another.
Some are still relatively funny, like the bit where the woman prosecuting Brooks’ case cues up a gag reel of an entire life’s worth of miscues, a rapid-fire montage of David mistaking shampoo for mouthwash, losing control of a pushed car or falling off his roof, but it cuts off before it even gets going. Later, David visits the Past Lives Pavilion, a place where people can get a glimpse of who they were in past lives. With all the infinite possibilities for jokes introduced here, the best ancestor Brooks can come up with is a native in headdress and face paint, fleeing from an unseen predator.
Yet the main evidence that Brooks had gone soft has nothing to do with any of this. It comes from the film’s structure, which involves a rather basic romantic comedy scenario between David and Julia (Meryl Streep), who he quickly realizes is the woman of his dreams. The dreary prosody of these types of movies is supposed to be stripped away by the strange setting; people only spend five days in Judgment City, then move on, either to Heaven or back to Earth to try again. But while Brooks and Streep have an easy rapport, there’s never anything between them that suggests they would be instant soul mates. It’s just another problematic symptom of a film where, for the first time, Brooks’ elaborate concept seems to trap rather than motivate him.
