I think that Real Life (1979) was a bold choice for comedian Albert Brooks to shoot as his directorial debut. It was released five years before Rob Reiner and Christopher Guest legitimized the mockumentary with This is Spinal Tap (1984), and it takes open potshots at the scientific community and the entertainment world with its faux attempt to document a year in the life of the American family. Brooks wisely chose Charles Grodin to play the beleaguered father of the clan at the center of this “An American Family” (1973) send-up, knowing that his Candid Camera experience would pay off. He also wisely accepted that for the picture to work, he would, playing himself, have to be the butt of most of the movie’s best jokes. The forays into directing by many comedians are littered with their insults of others, but Brooks understood that Real Life would benefit most from him putting egg on his own face.
It also benefits from Brooks understanding that much of the world regards “show business” as contrived, profit driven, and phony. In the film he plays himself as an entertainer who not only accepts these facets of the business, but revels in them. He’s a fake from the opening scene, in which he sings a ditty for the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, until the movie’s ridiculous and hilarious conclusion, as if by being so he’ll be more endearing. While this doesn’t work for the characters he interacts with onscreen, it does successfully woo the audience, as we can sense the desperation to be liked and accepted that dwells just below the surface of his caricature of himself.
He sets out to direct and host a documentary that chronicles the drama and comedy of real people, and appears to be well-intentioned in doing so. Like any performer he’s looking to be at the forefront of a new kind of entertainment. To fund the ambitious project he enlists the help of a human behavior laboratory, which will offset the cost and reassure the leery studio heads. Likewise, two behavioral psychologists are brought on to ensure the scientific credibility of the entire experiment. In an early scene in which Brooks details how the behaviorists selected the “perfect family,” he shows off his hubris by stating that he expects the film to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize.
These early scenes of exposition work well, because while the Brooks character takes them seriously, the film itself does not. Particularly amusing is the vignette where he displays the state of the art head mounted cameras that the crew will be using to record the footage. “Only six of these cameras were built. Of those, only five of them worked. We have four of those.” These helmet cams make the head of anyone who puts one on look like R2-D2 and function as an effective running gag throughout the movie. Of course the whole project goes awry when Brooks gets far too invasive and involved with his subjects. He starts shooting just as they return from a tiring vacation, and hilarity ensues when he follows the mother of the family to the gynecologist (and not in the way you might assume). Perhaps the best scene in the film is the botched heart surgery of a horse, performed by the Grodin character, a sometimes absentminded veterinarian. Brooks’ attempts to assuage the vet’s fears that his practice will suffer if the footage surfaces are mirthful; an exercise in subtle delivery that many contemporary comedians would benefit from studying.
As events careen out of control and the family begins to express regrets about their participation, the studio and the scientific observers both begin to voice their own doubts about the project. However, all of the chaos seems to only strengthen Brooks’ resolve. His film will be about the “real,” and none of these detractors’ negative impression of “reality” is beneficial to his goal. As all parties but Brooks agree to end the project prematurely, the director has a nervous breakdown, conceding in deliria (while donning a clown suit) that perhaps a dramatic flare borrowed from fiction would increase the real drama. What he resorts to I’ll leave for you to discover, but it prompts one of the most amusing and unfortunate endings I can recall.
The film is of course noted by many as ahead of its time; predicting the craze for “reality TV” that wouldn’t surface until more than a decade after this project with MTV’s “The Real World.” It points out the fallacies of such a premise while taking aim at both the entertainment industry and the audacity of the scientific community. At the same time it’s a rather bold portrait of an artist trying desperately to express his artistic vision. The problem comes from the fact that his vision is of someone else’s life. It is often said of some of the world’s finest entertainers that they don’t really have their own personality, but only that of whom they are expected to be. Brooks hits this note, and thus himself, the hardest. One gets the feeling that his character doesn’t want to film “real” life simply to document it, but to experience it himself for the first time.
Language: English
Runtime: 99 Minutes
Available through Netflix.com
Grade: 3 Hats Off
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