Real Life (1979)

Overrated and overhyped

Good movie but grossly overrated

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

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.

Local 'madness' in an Arizona small, one horse town. Based on a show shot in Santa Barbara California in 73' a first reality show, that went horribly wrong! It was a hit, but the family was never the same. This is an off the cuff answer to that first reality show, that I believe may have gone lost in translation. Sure this starts out interesting and goes right along, showing a small Arizona Phoenix as the place where the real family will be followed by a camera and crew, in the home, in their lives and all over the place. It seems at times so depressing and so real in parts... that it hurts just watching. That's not bad when it seems that it is real. Brooks has a creative and wild mind. With it all some how he can lose people in his presentation. It isn't that he is not talented, he just sees things through a different ' lens ' than most average do. If more people had been informed of why and how the movie came about, I think it would have done better at the theater. Albert Brooks is an entertaining creative craftsman and his work and acting shows to those who can follow what he is about.I recommend this movie for it's madness and reality type-lore but the fun part is seeing the Arizona from the seventies and how different it is today. Brooks will always be good at his job I believe, but you have to understand the mind from which it comes. (***)

In his directorial debut, Albert Brooks combines the broad but edgy satire developed in his short films on `Saturday Night Live' with the ruthless self-flagellation that would become his trademark and while it falls short of the genius that would explode in `Modern Romance' and `Lost In America', it's chock full of purpose. Brooks has a lot on his plate and wants to make sure he gets it all out in the open: his targets include documentary filmmaking, reality television (his prescience about today's programming is surprising), Hollywood and, not least of all, the role of the comedian as social critic in society. As a narcissistic comedian/filmmaker intruding into the lives of a hapless Phoenix nuclear family (the parents are Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain), Brooks immediately establishes a sophisticated filmic style that includes a mastery of long, uncomfortable takes and a shrewd sense of camera placement that keeps you tuned into the conceit of having lives recorded for fun and profit; that the conceit turns outrageously psychotic at the end only adds to the immaculate design. Unlike Woody Allen, whose unsightly condescension towards his audience is obvious and demeaning, Brooks respects his viewer's intelligence and rewards it with challenging material that's also accessible and funny.

#9 on my all-time list. Another one of those truly (and tragically) hidden gems -- full of great lines that you can spout ad nauseum to your friends and family until they finally see it (and, trust me, they'll thank you for it). Without question, this is Brooks' best. And true to his genius, arguably the funniest character in the film is one you never see -- just a voice on a speaker phone. If you don't become a Brooks fan after seeing this film, you'll never be one.