Defending Your Life. (PG.)
Directed by Albert Brooks
Starring Albert Brooks, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn, Lee Grant and Buck Henry. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from Criterion Collection. 111 mins.
This is an Afterlife film whose primary problem is that its concept of the afterlife is bunkum. Brooks plays an advertising executive who dies on his birthday because he drives his brand new BMW straight into a bus because he wasn't looking at the road while listening to Barbra Streisand perform Broadway show tunes. In the afterlife, he has a four-day hearing, a kind of court case with a prosecution and a defence, in which he will have to defend his life. Riding on the verdict isn't heaven and hell but his reincarnation: has he learnt enough to be ready to move up to the next level or will he have to go back to Earth and try again to achieve enlightenment.
How is that even a case? He was an advertising executive who dies on his birthday because he drives his brand new BMW straight into a bus because he wasn't looking at the road while listening to Barbra Streisand perform Broadway show tunes. Of course, he's gonna be chucked back! Probably as a bug. What part of that statement suggests a soul that has moved towards enlightenment? Surely the moment they see what is written in the Occupation line of his form the No Nirvana For You stamp comes down and comes down hard. (And we haven't even considered if anybody on the bus was injured or killed by his thoughtlessness.)
In theory, we give it points for the novelty of going with an Eastern theology but the adversarial scenario envisaged by Brook's doesn't fit with that at all. The film keeps repeating that this isn't a trial, but it very obviously is. The holding pen where the dead wait while their cases are heard is called Judgment City. It's all set up for the thumbs Up or Down verdict. Christianity's vision of the universe is hugely reductive but it is at least dramatic. Eastern philosophy's gradual movement towards enlightenment is hard to find an analogous comic premise for. (Plus its belief in recycling suggests a creator who is running the universe on the cheap.)
Judgment City is the Tibetan Book of the Dead reimagined as a Vegas-style retirement home. It's gleaming clean, all the guests wear angelic white robes, can go bowling or to comedy clubs and they can eat as much as they want without getting fat. It's like a geriatric Logan's Run. We are told this is because the place processes the deceased from the western half of America and has been designed to look comfortingly familiar to them, a get-out card it plays a little too frequently.
For me, the film goes wrong when Brooks dies. That's just 11 minutes in but they are a hilarious 11 minutes with him making a witty birthday speech at the office and going to the dealer to treat himself to the new BMW. This a great funny film but then he dies and that takes the wind out of its sails. We're thrown from vitality and life to rest and retirement. Maybe it's the clothes. Or that its concept is so unwieldy that any attempts at humour have no reality to work against. Why would there be a comedy club in Judgement City? And why would it have an unfunny comic? All the food is instant and delicious - why is the comedian not funny? The permanent staff are supposed to be enlightened higher beings that use around 50% of their brain rather than the 3% humans use. So why are they spending eternity working in the service industry?
Am I overthinking it? Maybe, but if I am than I'm sure that they are guilty of underthinking it.
And into all this Brooks decides to steer us into a romcom. Great, just what I need in the afterlife. He meets up with Streep and, even though the sparks do not fly, they fall instantly and completely in love. Streep looks like she is viewing this as a paid vacation and just letting her hair down. She was in the middle of a little run of comedy roles – before this Postcards From The Edge, after Death Becomes Her – and the attitude is that just being a relaxed, giggly, and-now-this-is-me Meryl will be enough. It doesn't help that the film puts her on a pedestal, makes her character flawless and doesn't give any reason for her to fall for Brooks other than her initial sense that she'd met him before. (You expect that line to have some relevance later on but nothing comes of it.)
Brooks is hard to read in this. He's so funny when he's alive; on the other side, he's a big mopey wuss. Maybe this is him being sensitive. You may have seen Brooks in edgy films like Taxi Driver and Drive but his definitive screen role is surely in James L. Brooks witty but still unctuous Oscar Pleader, Broadcast News. The two Brooks are simpatico, they have the same soft mushy definition of quality. The music score in both of these films is bland, tinkly respectable. Apart from a couple of shots of the Winnebago on the open road in Lost In America, there isn't a memorable image in either film. How does a comic imagination as sharp as Brooks get stuck in such bland surroundings?
Supplements
New conversation between Brooks and filmmaker Robert Weide
Directed by Albert Brooks
Starring Albert Brooks, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn, Lee Grant and Buck Henry. Out on Blu-ray and DVD from Criterion Collection. 111 mins.
This is an Afterlife film whose primary problem is that its concept of the afterlife is bunkum. Brooks plays an advertising executive who dies on his birthday because he drives his brand new BMW straight into a bus because he wasn't looking at the road while listening to Barbra Streisand perform Broadway show tunes. In the afterlife, he has a four-day hearing, a kind of court case with a prosecution and a defence, in which he will have to defend his life. Riding on the verdict isn't heaven and hell but his reincarnation: has he learnt enough to be ready to move up to the next level or will he have to go back to Earth and try again to achieve enlightenment.
How is that even a case? He was an advertising executive who dies on his birthday because he drives his brand new BMW straight into a bus because he wasn't looking at the road while listening to Barbra Streisand perform Broadway show tunes. Of course, he's gonna be chucked back! Probably as a bug. What part of that statement suggests a soul that has moved towards enlightenment? Surely the moment they see what is written in the Occupation line of his form the No Nirvana For You stamp comes down and comes down hard. (And we haven't even considered if anybody on the bus was injured or killed by his thoughtlessness.)
In theory, we give it points for the novelty of going with an Eastern theology but the adversarial scenario envisaged by Brook's doesn't fit with that at all. The film keeps repeating that this isn't a trial, but it very obviously is. The holding pen where the dead wait while their cases are heard is called Judgment City. It's all set up for the thumbs Up or Down verdict. Christianity's vision of the universe is hugely reductive but it is at least dramatic. Eastern philosophy's gradual movement towards enlightenment is hard to find an analogous comic premise for. (Plus its belief in recycling suggests a creator who is running the universe on the cheap.)
Judgment City is the Tibetan Book of the Dead reimagined as a Vegas-style retirement home. It's gleaming clean, all the guests wear angelic white robes, can go bowling or to comedy clubs and they can eat as much as they want without getting fat. It's like a geriatric Logan's Run. We are told this is because the place processes the deceased from the western half of America and has been designed to look comfortingly familiar to them, a get-out card it plays a little too frequently.
For me, the film goes wrong when Brooks dies. That's just 11 minutes in but they are a hilarious 11 minutes with him making a witty birthday speech at the office and going to the dealer to treat himself to the new BMW. This a great funny film but then he dies and that takes the wind out of its sails. We're thrown from vitality and life to rest and retirement. Maybe it's the clothes. Or that its concept is so unwieldy that any attempts at humour have no reality to work against. Why would there be a comedy club in Judgement City? And why would it have an unfunny comic? All the food is instant and delicious - why is the comedian not funny? The permanent staff are supposed to be enlightened higher beings that use around 50% of their brain rather than the 3% humans use. So why are they spending eternity working in the service industry?
Am I overthinking it? Maybe, but if I am than I'm sure that they are guilty of underthinking it.
And into all this Brooks decides to steer us into a romcom. Great, just what I need in the afterlife. He meets up with Streep and, even though the sparks do not fly, they fall instantly and completely in love. Streep looks like she is viewing this as a paid vacation and just letting her hair down. She was in the middle of a little run of comedy roles – before this Postcards From The Edge, after Death Becomes Her – and the attitude is that just being a relaxed, giggly, and-now-this-is-me Meryl will be enough. It doesn't help that the film puts her on a pedestal, makes her character flawless and doesn't give any reason for her to fall for Brooks other than her initial sense that she'd met him before. (You expect that line to have some relevance later on but nothing comes of it.)
Brooks is hard to read in this. He's so funny when he's alive; on the other side, he's a big mopey wuss. Maybe this is him being sensitive. You may have seen Brooks in edgy films like Taxi Driver and Drive but his definitive screen role is surely in James L. Brooks witty but still unctuous Oscar Pleader, Broadcast News. The two Brooks are simpatico, they have the same soft mushy definition of quality. The music score in both of these films is bland, tinkly respectable. Apart from a couple of shots of the Winnebago on the open road in Lost In America, there isn't a memorable image in either film. How does a comic imagination as sharp as Brooks get stuck in such bland surroundings?
Supplements
New conversation between Brooks and filmmaker Robert Weide
- New interview on the afterlife with theologian and critic Donna Bowman
- New program featuring excerpts from 1991 interviews with Brooks and actors Lee Grant and Rip Torn
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by filmmaker Ari Aster
