Lost in America

Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty being rebels of the road -- in a Winnebago.

From the Criterion website, fair use.

Lost in America (1985). Grade: B

Albert Brooks plays a very well-paid advertising executive who gets ticked one day when his very-tired wife, Julie Hagerty, wonders if they aren’t being “too responsible.” They’ve just sold their home and bought a new one, a boring house in a boring L.A. neighborhood. The word “responsible” makes Brooks feel like she’s saying he’s old and boring.

The nest day, he has a big meeting with his boss, and Brooks expects it’s to announce his promotion. Nope! It’s to tell him he’s being transferred to the New York office, to work on a big new account. A less-clever guy got the promotion instead; the boss even lets on that the other guy is more “executive” material, and he wants to keep Brooks in the creative department. So Brooks absoultely LOSES IT.

What’s great about the scene, as Roger Ebert noted, is how utterly narcissistic Brooks is being here. OK, it’s not exactly the promotion he wanted, but it’s still probably a pay bump. He’s so convinced of his own rightness that he works himself up into indignant fury, because the boss took him out for friendly lunches a few times. As he’s being escorted from the office, Brooks yells to everyone within earshot, “don’t let this man take you to lunch! His lunches are LIES!”

He immediately goes to Hagerty’s office at the department store she works for, and demands she quite her job, too. She’s inspired him! He’s through with being responsible! She’s a little excited by his energy, and a little scared. Eventually they decide on a plan — they’re gonna sell everything, and buy a big RV, and travel around the country. (40 years later, they could hang out with noted RV fan Clarence Thomas.)

The joke is that Brooks (38 when this came out) sees himself as following in the steps of the bikers in Easy Rider — on the road, he even waves and honks at bikers like he’s a fellow rebel. And the joke’s that Brooks has been kind of a domineering force in the marriage — and, in her own way, Hagerty’s about to assert herself. In the first scene, he’s pestering her while she’s trying to sleep. He always demands that she do the thing he wants to do RIGHT NOW. She’s been holding it in; she’s ready to pop.

Albert Brooks’s dad was a fairly well-known radio comedian, Harry Einstein (so young Albert’s name was “Albert Einstein.”) Brooks began performing stand-up while in college, and eventually became a frequent guest on things like Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. When Saturday Night Live debuted in 1975, Brooks wrote and directed several short films for the show; he’d soon have small-but-memorable roles in movies like Taxi Driver and Private Benjamin. He wrote and directed himself in 1979’s Real Life and 1981’s Modern Romance (both co-written with Monica Johnson, as this is).

A Criterion essayist sums up Brooks’s characters in these movies quite well: “a worry-stricken man desperately impressing his anxieties upon a bemused, notably less nebbishy partner.” (That essayist? Thriller/horror director Ari Aster! Go figure.) My favorite incarnation of the character comes in the opening scene of Defending Your Life, where Brooks is driving around in his fancy car, signing happily away to Barbra Streisand on CD. He’s an utterly self-obsessed yuppie twerp in these movies, and his character LIKES it that way. (It keeps his narcissism from being annoying; we’re not asked to feel SORRY for him, the way we are the narcissistic Woody Allen characters.)

Julie Hagerty, of course, was in Airplane!, and carries that same sort of cuteness and likability over to this part. There’s a great turn after Brooks gets furious with her; she gets sick of taking it and hitchhikes away. When Brooks catches up with her, she’s in a diner with a big/burly guy, who bops Brooks once in the nose and wins that fight. Driving away, Hagerty starts laughing at Brooks, and the more he tells her “it’s not funny,” she more she giggles, until he has to admit, yeah it is kinda funny. What was he doing playing a tough guy for half a second? That’s just silly.

That scene, and an earlier one with Garry Marshall (himself a Hollywood comedy director of schmaltz like Pretty Woman) are the highlights of the movie. Per IMDb, Marshall was irritable at Brooks asking for retake after retake, and later realized, Brooks was doing it to MAKE him irritable — that’s what the character’s supposed to be, is a little bemused and a little ticked off. (Pauline Kael pointed out that, had this been a Preston Sturges movie, the Marshall character might have been open to a loony idea.)

The last 20 minutes are pleasant enough, although they don’t really go anywhere. Brooks has one scene where he’s forced to be annoyed by some kids, and you wish there was more scenes like this — in an Criterion interview with a perceptive film critic, Brooks says it’s because his character here would only need one such annoyance to realize how much he has to resolve the whole situation. OK, that makes dramatic sense, but not comedic sense — Brooks is at his funniest when he’s annoyed.

This is unusual among 80s yuppie movies — most had the characters learn life lessons about valuing the REAL things that matter. Here, the characters learn absolutely nothing at all! But you imagine their marriage is a lot healthier when all’s said and done.

The score by Arthur B. Rubenstein is harmless enough, and the cinematography by Eric Saarinen is really quite good at times, particularly the outdoor scenes. (There’s a nice series of shots of the Winnebago on the road at the end, neatly capturing the journey to those of you who know your US geography.) And Brooks is a skilled visual director here, knowing exactly when a long shot of an amazing vista highlights the comedy of the bickering. (Visually, Brooks is a better director than James L. Brooks, who appeared in two of Albert Brooks’s films — although Albert Brooks wouldn’t have James L.’s skill at directing drama.)

Mostly what Brooks has the good sense to do here, as a writer and as a director, is to show himself in a self-depreciating light, and let Julie Hagerty do her thing. She’s great when whe’s laughing at him, or putting up with his manic highs, or the scene where she pops and just loses control. Brooks wanted Bill Murray to play his role, and Murray would have been OK, but I can’t imagine anybody but Julie Hagerty in that “losing control” scene. It’s like Joan Cusack flipping out in In & Out; it’s a unique comic moment only THIS actor could do.

A bittersweet funny thing from the DVD interview; Brooks wanted the rights to a particular song used in the movie, and wrote the singer personally to beg for it, as that singer had never allowed their music to be in a movie before. Brooks mentioned that his dad had been a fan, and had died after performing at a 1958 roast of Lucille Ball/Desi Arnaz — and the singer had been at the roast! Maybe he killed Brooks’s dad! The singer granted permission to use the song.

(Brooks is just a funny guy, period; in the press kit, for this, he wrote, “In or out of the system, people harbor the delusion that a new place, a new job, will make everything better, that the solution to your life is just around the corner” ... "Sometimes I think of opening a restaurant in Oregon, like a teacher of mine from Carnegie Tech did. But mostly I think about fleeing to South America with all the money from this production.” And the first scene has an audio clip of Larry King interviewing film critic Rex Reed on the radio. Per Ari Aster, it's because Rex Reed panned Albert Brooks’s other films. Well, Reed sure sounds like a fatuous ass, in that clip — well played, Brooks.)

One last waste of your time. In writing for this little site, I’ve come across a LOT of movie review websites. And most tend to fall into one of three categories. There’s the super-super artsy critics, who will review mostly foreign films and movies with social statements. There’s the strictly “what’s popular” critics, who will review every Marvel movie. And there’s the consensus hybrids, who love Oppenheimer and The Sound of Music; basically, liking whatever “most” other critics like.

I mention this because I found one site with an interesting name, GoneWithTheTwins, which I was curious about as I’m a grudging/grumpy Twins baseball fan. Well, the site has nothing to do with the baseball Twins (it’s just two twin brothers reviewing movies), and is VERY of the “we love what other critics love” mentality. So it’s not the sort of thing I read. The web design is really topnotch, though. I’m sitting here hopped up on painkillers after having four wisdom teeth ripped out, trying to squeeze in every last procedure and test I can possibly get before losing Medicaid forever, and I can only stare at the web design for GoneWithTheTwins and sigh with envy. It really looks sharp and professional. I’m happy with myself if I can do one image edit correctly.

I’d generally sneer at such a site’s reviews, and yup, when it comes to something like Gone With the Wind or Casablanca, they’re exactly what 10,000 other critics have said. (I’d say, GWTW is an overlong racist soap opera, and Casablanca OK, but there’s 10 other Bogart movies I like better.) But when GoneWithTheTwins reviewed Lost in America, they weren’t far off from the way I saw it. The Shop Around the Corner, too.

Essentially, I think, the more that a reviewer is doing lesser-known movies, movies that don’t have as much written about them, the more interesting that writing is going to be. Lost in America and The Shop Around the Corner were modestly successful, in their time, but they’re not movies most people would list when they think of titles from the 1980s or 1940s.

So far, the very best sites I’ve found are scifist.net and pre-code.com, focusing respectively on EVERY worldwide sci-fi film ever made and Hollywood movies made before the 1934 censorship rules. PsychotronicReview has a great blog and analysis of movies I promise you’ve never heard of (Todd and the Book of Pure Evil, for example). I think these things are just much more interesting than a site which writes about famous popular films exactly what Rex Reed would write.

But gosh, is GoneWithTheTwins well-designed. I’m very envious. If I give American Beauty a “10/10,” can I get good wesite design too? Probably not, you say? Oh, well.