One of my major discoveries of this year is Albert Brooks. His comedy develops in a unique way from his queasiness regarding contemporary mores and he always plays the male symbol of self-absorption that his films affectionately target. Part of the joke is that his affluent characters myopically find misery in often mundane setbacks. Brooks takes their lives and concerns seriously (refreshingly, Brooks doesn't hold their wealth against them), but there's an implicit rebuke in their pettiness, and their journeys are carefully littered with clear-eyed supporting characters that illuminate their lack of suffering.
His character this time is more disturbed than most, a film editor working on a suitably bad George Kennedy sci-fi picture (Kennedy appears as himself at the director's house party), involved in an on-again/off-again relationship with a pretty banker named Mary (Kathryn Harrold). As the film opens, he breaks off their relationship yet again. Immediately regretting the decision, he seeks solace from his assistant editor (Bruno Kirby), who sends him home with a few Quaaludes. The ensuing chemical high leads to an extended scene of astonishing observation in which Brooks stumbles around talking to himself, his parakeet, his rolodex, and his record player ("I love my album collection. Look, I have so many great records!"), drunk-dialing a date with a woman he won't remember in the morning, and promising to embark on a new, Mary-free life. (The blind date is one of Brooks's wisdom-imparters, a lovelorn aging woman who clearly idolizes his character; their night together consists of a one-take drive around the block and back to her home again, the camera fixed on the hood capturing them both through the windshield, a sad Michael Jackson ballad on the radio.)
This resolution doesn't last long and soon enough they're back together. The story then takes a darkly funny turn into intense sexual jealousy and his character's controlling, near-sociopathic behavior. The film absolutely nails that feeling of sexual obsession-cum-inadequacy, in which you know the woman that you love is too good for you, so you compensate by holding her under your thumb, guarding her from the other guys drooling all over her low-cut blouse. By presenting this side of the male ego as bald reality, the film rightly renders such behavior insane but also symptomatic of the skewed state of monogamy in modern culture. Brooks doesn't quite go all the way with his character's increasingly mad behavior; if he has one flaw as writer-director, it's that he loves his characters too much to end their stories sourly, so the film has a rather warmed over, unsatisfying non-conclusion. But it's a very good film nonetheless, full of the kind of penetrating social observations at which Brooks is uncommonly adept.
His character this time is more disturbed than most, a film editor working on a suitably bad George Kennedy sci-fi picture (Kennedy appears as himself at the director's house party), involved in an on-again/off-again relationship with a pretty banker named Mary (Kathryn Harrold). As the film opens, he breaks off their relationship yet again. Immediately regretting the decision, he seeks solace from his assistant editor (Bruno Kirby), who sends him home with a few Quaaludes. The ensuing chemical high leads to an extended scene of astonishing observation in which Brooks stumbles around talking to himself, his parakeet, his rolodex, and his record player ("I love my album collection. Look, I have so many great records!"), drunk-dialing a date with a woman he won't remember in the morning, and promising to embark on a new, Mary-free life. (The blind date is one of Brooks's wisdom-imparters, a lovelorn aging woman who clearly idolizes his character; their night together consists of a one-take drive around the block and back to her home again, the camera fixed on the hood capturing them both through the windshield, a sad Michael Jackson ballad on the radio.)
This resolution doesn't last long and soon enough they're back together. The story then takes a darkly funny turn into intense sexual jealousy and his character's controlling, near-sociopathic behavior. The film absolutely nails that feeling of sexual obsession-cum-inadequacy, in which you know the woman that you love is too good for you, so you compensate by holding her under your thumb, guarding her from the other guys drooling all over her low-cut blouse. By presenting this side of the male ego as bald reality, the film rightly renders such behavior insane but also symptomatic of the skewed state of monogamy in modern culture. Brooks doesn't quite go all the way with his character's increasingly mad behavior; if he has one flaw as writer-director, it's that he loves his characters too much to end their stories sourly, so the film has a rather warmed over, unsatisfying non-conclusion. But it's a very good film nonetheless, full of the kind of penetrating social observations at which Brooks is uncommonly adept.