Real Life (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Michael Sandlin

Produced by Penelope Spheeris; directed by Albert Brooks; written by Albert Brooks, Monica Johnson, and Harry Shearer; art direction by Linda Spheeris and Linda Marder; cinematography by Eric Saarinen; edited by David Finfer; music by Mort Lindsey; starring Albert Brooks, Charles Grodin, Frances Lee McCain, Lisa Urette, Robert Stirrat, Matthew Tobin, and J. A. Preston. 4K UHD + Blu-ray Combo Edition, color, 99 min., 1979. A Criterion Collection release.

By the time Albert Brooks’s full-length directorial debut, Real Life, was released in cinemas in 1979, the comedian/filmmaker was already at the second major crossroads of a showbiz career that had spanned over a decade. In 1975, he gave up a successful stand-up career to join the fledgling Saturday Night Live as a contributor of short films. A few years later he was given half a million dollars to make the proto-mockumentary spoof that became Real Life, now resurrected (greenlighted and supervised by Brooks himself) in this newly minted Criterion two-disc set, which includes a 4K Ultra High Definition disc and Blu-ray (with an impeccable restoration from the original 35mm print), candid new interviews with co-star Frances Lee McCain and Brooks, and an informative booklet essay by critic A. S. Hamrah. 

Brooks’s TV appearances in the early 1970s, all mostly unrehearsed solo performances (thirty appearances on the Tonight Show no less), blew holes in every tired Vegas-style-comedy trope held over from the 1950s and 1960s, not to mention completely ignoring then-trendy political humor with Vietnam or Watergate themes. As with Brooks’s like-minded peers Steve Martin and Martin Mull, comedy no longer had to be a geriatric Bob Hope mother-in-law joke; it could also be an off-the-cuff deconstructive sendup of everything that had become overrehearsed about stand-up comedy and show business in general. (Brooks’s early experiments in rogue ventriloquism were a great example of this onstage murdering of tradition.) Later, his wry cliché-busting critique of the comedic formulae still pervading American variety-show comedy played out with knee-slapping results in his most revered SNL short, “Albert Brooks Famous School for Comedians.” 

And in a sense Real Life is still a product of Brooks’s experimental short-films era, which would soon give way to the more conventional story-driven Rom-Com elements that defined everything from Modern Romance (1981) to Lost in America, up through his 1990s output where the “Rom” began to overtake the “Com” in films like 1991’s Defending Your Life and The Muse (1998). Real Life gets most of its hindsight plaudits nowadays for ahead-of-its time brilliance in both predicting and lampooning a genre (reality TV) whose popular advent—at least in the Kardashians/Real Housewives form as we know it—wouldn’t happen until the execrable Real World weekly series on MTV was rolled out to wide Gen X acclaim in 1992.

Back in 1979, however, Brooks seemed to be doing little more than taking inexplicable satirical aim at the 1973 PBS documentary series An American Family, and its ludicrous critical reception as some sort of anthropological breakthrough in documenting the lives of a modern American family (in this case, the already disintegrating Loud family). Most likely it was an uberpretentious statement by Margaret Mead in praise of the PBS documentary that stuck in Brooks’s craw: “As new and significant as the invention of drama or the novel…a new way in which people can learn to look at life, by seeing the real life of others interpreted by the camera.” Real Life can at least partially be read as Brooks’s sardonic rebuttal to this pseudoscientific piffle. Brooks comically posits what happens to this objective “reality” when it’s not only filtered through a camera lens but also when it’s inevitably subject to a filmmaker’s own sensibility, ego, professional ambition, and relationship to the subject—all of which, Real Life suggests, contributes to a far messier version of reality. Moreover, Brooks’s movie begs the question: How many versions of “reality” could there possibly be?

Real Life quickly unspools almost like a compendium of Brooks’s showbiz career up to that point. Right from the start, we get parodic variety-show musical comedy, digs at the “average” American, and spoofing of Hollywood pretensions. All of these elements are meticulously rendered in tight comedic set pieces and scenes and often with nonprofessional actors being put in awkward situations (which always makes for comedy gold), recalling the punchy off-kilter humor of his SNL shorts. (There’s even a cheeky nod to his old TV “ventriloquism” act later in the film.) But there’s still a sense here, as with Brooks’s stand-up material, that a seeming loss of control is always around the corner—and with Real Life’s unhinged Gone With the Wind-inspired ending, we get exactly that.

Soon we see Brooks’s on-screen fictional version of himself as striving a-hole Hollywood director “Albert Brooks” touting the scientific heft of his bold experiment with documentary reality. Real Life directly mocks American Family’s perceived pretensions to social science through a series of bogus behavioral tests including a driving exam to make sure the cameramen won’t be killed while filming in the family car. There’s also a scene that overtly parodies the family selection process of An American Family for which director Craig Gilbert interviewed (more like auditioned) more than twenty families before settling on the Louds. Brooks’s character exaggeratedly concocts the same sort of pseudoscientific tests for the prospective families as the “first step” in creating the basis for this heightened reality that purports to go farther than An American Family in not only capturing interactive dynamics between family members but also family and filmmaker. 

From the moment the smarmy on-camera director persona of “Albert Brooks” tells his ersatz version of the Loud family, the Yeagers, to “be yourselves!,” the viewer knows from that point on that no one will be able to actually be “themselves” on camera. The Yeagers, unlike the upper-middle-class Louds, are depicted as the true embodiment of middle-class Middle America (i.e., crushingly conventional) whose mediocre filial dysfunction is nowhere near as camera-friendly as the Louds’ genteel California-style domestic strife. Interesting also is Brooks’s choice to have the Yeagers reside in Arizona, which here and in Lost in America is depicted as a dreary frontier wasteland: through Brooks’s lens, the Valley of the Sun comes off more like the Valley of the Shadow of Death; it’s where the Howards’ dreams of future nest eggs would go to die in Brooks’s baby-boomer satire Lost in America (1985).

Real Life’s human guinea pig family, the Yeagers, is headed by Warren, a dour veterinarian played with trademark blankness by Charles Grodin; Frances Lee McCain is the moody (possibly borderline bipolar) matriarch Jeanette, along with their worryingly unstable children. Brooks’s not-so-subtle suggestion here is that the Yeagers are chosen for the experiment because they are only slightly less boring and insipid than their competition. Almost as soon as Brooks’s on-screen character meets the family and begins filming their everyday lives, he speaks about them as if they were fictional subjects: he wonders whether, for example, Warren, his “leading man,” is “sympathetic” enough to appeal to a moviegoing audience. As you might expect, the “reality” facade is already cracking. 

From the first trainwreck Yeager family dinner we see on camera, Warren is fully committed to Brooks’s cinematic experiment: but only in the sense that Warren thinks he can maintain the veneer of normalcy that he wants audiences to see as “reality.” Jeanette, however, seems to be the only Yeager keeping it “real” so to speak; she has no filtering process and is more than willing to broach uncomfortable subjects while the cameras roll. It’s only when Warren gets distracted at work by the film crew and botches a routine operation on a horse (!) that we see his attitude toward the film start to drift into skepticism. At that point, the film-within-the film becomes a bizarre tug of war between the dramatic, saleable version of reality Brooks’s director so desperately wants for the film and the spotless Norman Rockwell family portrait that Warren tries to maintain in front of the camera. The fictional “Albert Brooks” here, is your typical meretricious Tinseltown charlatan for whom obnoxious personal ambition is a stand-in for talent. He has no real interest in the Yeagers’ lives and intrudes only enough to get what he needs to keep the film (and his precarious career) going.

When Brooks’s skewering of flyover-state America is at its most potent—as in Real Life and Lost in America—it’s no exaggeration to say he’s operating in the rarefied air of great American social satirists (think Sinclair Lewis on acid). Yet Brooks never simply relies on cheap highbrow elitism in his comedy. Brooks’s egalitarian range encompasses just about everybody and everything circulating in his orbit, including the milieu with which he’s most familiar: the money-conscious, ambition-crazed, intellectually barren LA coastal elite. Real Life even pokes fun at America’s obsession with technological advancement that was in full flourish by the end of the 1970s. The film introduces a whole range of fictional techno-absurdities: the first head-held digital camera, the Ettinauer 226 XM, made in Holland; the Graphicon 8000, which gives a digital readout of someone’s “screen presence”; and “heat sensing” wall cams from Japan. At one point, after introducing the Yeagers to the film crew, Brooks announces that “advances in modern technology” mean that these workers aren’t actually needed on the film: “The union makes us take them!”

Real Life’s failure at the box office and lukewarm critical reception, as it turned out, was probably due to timing as much as anything else. Brooks’s obscure debut was released into the cutthroat cinematic environment that marked 1979, possibly the greatest year for American mainstream feature film in a decade: think, for starters, Breaking Away, Apocalypse Now, Alien, The Jerk, Kramer vs. Kramer, and The Warriors, among many others. And although Steve Martin’s hapless moron Navin R. Johnson may have been 1979’s most popular movie “jerk,” Brooks’s unscrupulous auteur-wannabe in Real Life, if nothing else, probably qualifies as that year’s biggest celluloid shithead. “I’m a stupid, stupid jerk,” he finally admits to his cameramen, “Reality sucks!”

Michael Sandlin is a U.K.-based writer and academic.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 1