Real Life (1979)
Albert Brooks’ twenty years ahead of its time satire of our unattainable, inexplicable quest to imbue our entertainment with “reality”; to reproduce real life that’s blessed with sense, perspective and general watchability. That all of these elements are elusive and contradictory seems to always be beside the point. Reality television, in its current incarnation, is largely a blatantly false soap opera, catering not to our need for reality but to our obsessive drive to experience the most outwardly, obviously voyeuristic sensation that we possibly can, devoid of any distracting elements such as craftsmanship and story; the windows of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, without the killer and (unfortunately) without Grace Kelly.
Real Life isn’t targeting the spectators of reality television though (reality tv had yet to become a fashion statement). This picture instead concerns the ego of a wannabe creator of the sport: a filmmaker played (using his name) by Mr. Brooks himself. Real Life, Brooks’ first as director, has that not quite tangible tang that is always both the best and worst quality of an Albert Brooks film. Real Life, like the hero of Brooks’ Defending Your Life, doesn’t push its reason for being far enough-every joke (most of which are promising) hangs in the air, unfulfilled. This lack of fulfillment is disappointing but it is also precisely this lacking that gives a Brooks movie its charge. The tempo of Brooks’ pictures is original and true-and uncompromisingly reflects the self-loathing temperament of their filmmaker. This is why Modern Romance remains Brooks’ overall masterpiece-that picture picks up joke after un-punched joke too, only to eventually arrive at a cumulative effect that is unexpectedly heartbreaking- a major (in its minor key) movie of inner despair’s toll on basic human interaction-on the self-denial of the damn thing called love.
There’s always a POP moment in a Brooks movie though, at least the goods ones, that brings the entire picture together. In Modern Romance it was Brooks’ appeal to his woman, his assurance that, yes, he’s insane, but he’s devoted to her in a way that sanity prohibits (the picture, particularly for us fellow neurotics, is quite, legitimately, romantic). In Real Life, it’s also a moment near the end-when Brooks, after one setback and failure after another, caves in a fit of desperation and egomania. Brooks gets on his knees, and begs, begs, pleas for another shot at his failed attempt to capture an average American family, just as they normally would be (after countless intrusions).
The little things you wished Brooks had pushed farther up until this point: the attempt to sleep with the wife in order to save her marriage (have to see it to understand it); the racism, elitism and resentment batted back and forth between Brooks and a black colleague; the inner disintegration of the family (including a subtle Charles Grodin): all come to inform that final Brooks meltdown at the end; where he offers, after many promises of integrity, to splice just about any popular film into his real entertainment. Brooks has already sung for the public, has already played the literal clown, now, reduced to nothing, he faces the lowest of the low dark side of his manipulative, diseased effort to capture something “real”. This scene, and the ending this outburst triggers, is a major, unsettling, comedy moment, worth, like Modern Romance, all of the half starts that have occurred before. Here’s hoping that Albert Brooks, who has appeared to have succumbed to bitterness in his last few films, rediscovers his blistering black comic humanity of the unsaid, particularly in a world where Real Life’s finale is now just another thing on Fox, a taking off point for Meet the Baios, perhaps.
★★★
Being There (1979)
Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers) watches TV and waits for the maid Louise to bring him his breakfast. Louise enters and tells him that the man of the house has died. Chance pauses, and comments on the weather. Louise, aghast, asks Chance if that is all he has to say. A moment later she embraces him, and, tenderly, says something to the effect of “Of course, it is.”
Chance, having no legal claim on the residence, is tossed out by a couple of lawyers and forced to find a new way in life. He is hit by a car, luckily the car of very wealthy, powerful man, Benjamin Rand (Melvyn Douglas). Benjamin’s wife, Eve (Shirley MacLaine) gives Chance a ride to their house to get fixed up and offers him a drink on the way. Eve asks Chance for his name as he chokes on his first sip of liquor, suddenly “Chance the Gardener” has become Chauncey Gardener, and it would seem that Chauncey Gardener is a wizard of financial practices, just the kind of wizard the President of the United States needs…even though Chance the Gardener would appear to be illiterate.
This scenario could be from a Frank Capra movie of the 1940s, or a John Landis movie of the 1980s. Instead Being There is, to everyone’s benefit, a Hal Ashby movie of the 1970s. The film is obviously a satire, of our self-absorption, of our insecure need to buy whatever’s being sold just so long as the salesman looks right, and of our rush to believe generic, comforting, meaningless promises. In short, Being There is the perfect film to revisit during the primaries, a time when our country speaks vanilla vagueries as a second language.
The most notable aspect of Being There is, as usual with Ashby, the tone. I’m not quite sure how to quantify what Ashby brings to any given film, but there is an elusive, tender electricity to his films that has been under-acknowledged. Let’s try to pin it down. This film works as bitter, sad satire, but is also very moving and strange without compromising the satire. Ashby, unlike many satirists in film, doesn’t sacrifice humanity for the sake of a theme, satire or not, humanity IS the theme, as it almost always is with an Ashby picture.
Many of Being There’s best scenes would probably be cut by another director. Watch the scene when Eve tries to seduce Chance. The naughty wife trying to screw the hapless hero is a staple of the Misunderstood Stupid Guy genre, but Ashby’s version is goofier and more vulnerable: heightened and real at the same time. Chance has no idea what Eve is offering him, and tells her that he likes to watch. He’s referring to watching television, but she takes him to mean something else entirely, leading to image of memorable loneliness and disconnect: Eve masturbates on the floor while Chance obliviously imitates an elaborate position on the program he’s watching.
Or watch how Ashby and screenwriter Jerzy Kosinski handle the Benjamin Rand character. Most films would play off of the character’s greed over and over again, but Rand, who is dying, is allowed a moment of grace and understanding. Rand’s doctor, who’s always been suspicious, figures out that Chauncey is merely a Chance, and approaches Rand on his death bed. Yes, Rand has elevated Chance because he tells the old man what he’s always wanted to hear (nothing) but we see in this scene that a certain longing also motivates him. Douglas, who is terrific, gets a line here that’s almost too much for this kind of film; he tells the doctor that knowing Chance has made him feel better about dying. What can the doctor possibly say to a confession like that?
None of these scenes soften the impact of Ashby and Kozinski’s rage though, which culminates in a devastating final image that ups the stakes considerably. Are all lives spent following meaningless, random, idiotic catch phrases? Are even the swiftest thinkers slaves to chic? Are even the super sacred things accident or happenstance? Is the film’s final line: “Life is a state of mind” meant as consolation or damnation? And what of Peter Sellers’ uncompromising work as Chance? I would be tempted to call the character poignant, the performance heartbreaking, but maybe that’s what I want to see just as a financial whatevermayhaveyou is what Rand needed to see. The idea of a total cipher is too unbearable and alien to imagine, and when we don’t understand something, well, then we decide to make it something we DO understand, like, oh I don’t know, how we may or may not use religion to rationalize something beyond our ability to rationalize.
Being There isn’t perfect. At 130 minutes, it’s thirty minutes too long, and Ashby’s pace is too deliberate, funereal. The film should be faster and more anarchic, like some of the earlier Ashby pictures, but the passion, the curiosity, the anger of Being There will stick with you. Just as the image of Chance watching his television as refuge from the surrounding confusion will stick with you.
★★★½
Hardcore (1979)
When Paul Schrader’s chilly, distant, intellectualized sensibility fits the subject matter
(Affliction, Autofocus, portions of his
Exorcist) the results can be extraordinary. When they don’t, and they don’t fit
Hardcore, his films feel like particularly boring, borderline inhumane exhibits at the Calvinist Guilt Science Emporium Road Show.
Schrader’s bad films are all theory, no feeling or story, you grab what he’s dealing with without giving the slightest of damns what happens. This is why Martin Scorsese was such an ideal interpreter of Schrader’s work. Scorsese isn’t perfect, and he can be overrated in stretches, but he understands, lives and dramatizes feverish obsession and guilt like nobody’s business.
Hardcore, like portions of the Scorsese-Schrader Taxi Driver, was evidently informed by that particular generation of directors’ pre-occupaton with The Searchers. You wouldn’t have to read too deep to get that here. George C. Scott is Jake, but he’s playing a haunted, immovable man of few words in the Wayne in The Searchers mode, only here Scott’s superiority isn’t under examination.
From the get go Scott is above the pornographers who’ve apparently made off with his daughter and there’s no friction or temptation. Scott is a prig here, the kind of character Harvey Keitel’s Sport assumes DeNiro to be in Taxi Driver, and if there wasn’t a little girl mixed up in this, you’d probably root for the pornographers.
I counted exactly one human moment in Hardcore and that’s early on when we can hear the strains of Neil Young’s haunting “Helpless” as Scott questions a porn clerk about a movie his daughter appeared in. That and Peter Boyle’s amusing supporting performance are it.
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