Real Life

Rating:
Summary: Released in 1979 and Really Prophetic About 2001
Review: Writer-director-comic actor Albert Brooks has done consistently solid work since this film but it remains his very best. It is a parody, astonishingly enough, of TODAY'S work on tv yet he made this film in 1979! Tv today is parlaying extensive money out of real life situations, whether based on survival or marrying millionaires or some other new trend of the day. These are big reasons why I don't watch tv anymore. If you are unfamiliar with Brooks, who also plays the "auteur" director in the film, you must understand two things about him. One, he always plays obnoxious characters and this is perhaps his most obnoxious ever. Two, he is absolutely merciless on portraying himself as obnoxious. His delivery is straight on and deadpan and totally works. Brooks's character does not have an iota of real self awareness and this too is typical of the roles he creates for himself in all of his films. This is Brooks's satiric look at a documentary purportedly capturing a year in the life of a typical American family. Charles Grodin, low key as usual, is fantastic as Warren Yeager, the Phoenix, Arizona, veterinarian who is largely passive and ineffectual. He, his wife and two children are easily overwhelmed by the callous Brooks as auteur. There are so many delights to this film that it is hard to name them all so here are just a few. Brooks showing you his choice of camera, a piece of headgear that looks like a robot suit and is all but extinct; Brooks kicking off his film in AZ before an audience of townspeople by breaking into song; Brooks capturing the wife's OB-GYN md on camera and unmasking him as a "60 Minutes" subject; Brooks capturing Yeager (Grodin) malpracticing on a horse patient on camera and Yeager's trying to remove that segment from the film; the production meetings Brooks conducts with his producer sitting in by speaker phone, telling him what's wrong with his movie and why showing real life will not "play" in America and that what he really needs is James Caan (who was hot in 1979). I saw this movie when it first opened at a film festival and have seen it many times in succeeding years. It is always absolutely hilarious and unfortunately prophetic about the "thrills" audiences of the future would want from the media.