In his most thorough feat of self-deprecation, Albert Brooks plays himself as a smarmy upstart Hollywood director charged with filming a real-life portrait of an "ordinary" Phoenix family to be financed by the Boulder Institute for Behavioral Science. Taking as its satirical subject the PBS series "An American Family", Real Life's opening text scroll includes an excerpt from a media critic that reads (paraphrasing), "This is a whole new method of anthropological research
as interpreted by the camera." It's the last part, "interpreted by the camera," that clearly interests Brooks. In detailing the crumbling of the family and the director's process of selecting what to shoot and how (it isn't long before he's staging scenes), Brooks shows how the mere presence of the camera shapes a new reality for spectator and subject. Their first dinner under camera (the technicians wear ridiculous astronaut-like helmet devices over the top halves of their bodies) has Charles Grodin trying to present his perfect family, but his stressed-out wife gives a hilariously blunt assessment of her feelings. (Meanwhile, Brooks wonders whether his leading man is coming across as unsympathetic.) The institute's naïve statisticians don't see the folly of their pursuit until Brooks makes the film his blatant vanity project; the comic highpoint is a montage of happy, slow-motion family moments that Brooks narrates ("I'll show the French what a montage really is!"). In this project, all are delusional, from the quixotic scientists who fatuously hired Hollywood talent for a film about reality to the unseen producer who makes money the inappropriate subject of every conversation. And film-making, like all profit-driven endeavors, is subject to self-interest, rendering futile the entire notion of the camera as objective recorder. But try telling that to a Hollywood producer.
