The Muse
Writer, director and actor Albert Brooks
It's a great irony that the quintessential Albert Brooks character doesn't appear in one of his own films, but in Broadcast News (1987). Brooks plays a too-smart-for-his-own-good television reporter who watches in horror as his best friend, news producer Holly Hunter, falls for fatuous would-be anchor William Hurt. Not only is he seriously (and secretly) in love with Hunter, but realizes that Hurt's shallow pretty boy — who represents everything he despises professionally and ethically — will eventually succeed in a medium that prizes flash over substance.
Like his Broadcast News doppelganger, Brooks is an intellectual outsider. A wry social satirist, he has found a niche in an industry that has little use for his low-key brand of cerebral humor.
In the six films he's written, directed, and starred in, Brooks has perfected a paradoxical Baby Boomer archetype: immensely self-aware yet insecure, demanding and deeply neurotic, navel-gazers who can't fathom why their perfectly planned lives are continually going awry. Call them needy, angst-ridden, even delusional, but Brooks insists they're not whiners.
"There's the difference between a whiner — where everything's going perfect and you're complaining — and [when] life throws you a horrible curve, and you talk about it and deal with it," he explains.
Brooks's characters (particularly the ones he embodies) firmly believe that they are in control of their lives. When stripped of this illusion, they must learn to make their way in a new, unknown world.
"My characters start out gung-ho and wind up in the mud very early on," agrees Brooks, "but when you think of it, that's comedy. Laurel and Hardy didn't make a movie about easily getting a piano up to the fifth floor. That would be a very quick, boring movie. So there always has to be some problem or conflict or disappointment to comedically overcome."
The 52-year-old Brooks faced his first hurdle at birth: his radio comedian father Harry Einstein named him Albert Einstein. Albert went into the family business anyway (his brother is comedian Super Dave Osborne), starting with stand-up in the late 1960s. He began directing with the short film, Albert Brooks's Famous School For Comedians, and did six more shorts for the fledgling Saturday Night Live.
His first feature, Real Life (1979), was an out-and-out parody of the PBS cinéma vérité series, An American Family (a precursor of today's reality television). Brooks mined humor from the interaction between documentary subjects and the film crew that hounds them 24-7.
But it was Modern Romance (1981) where he began to develop his signature style. Playing a film editor involved in a passionate on again/off again relationship with a bank executive (Kathryn Harrold), Brooks explores the frictions that arise when a self absorbed professional must also satisfy the inflated expectations of a needy romantic partner.
Lost In America (1985) went one step further, taking dead-aim at Reagan era yuppie culture. A two-career couple (Brooks and Julie Hagerty) drop out of the rat race and head off in a Winnebago to find the "real America." What they discover instead are themselves, particularly the weaknesses which the surface prosperity of their former lives conveniently cloaked.
His next two films, Defending Your Life (1991) and Mother (1996), continued to explore Baby Boomer angst, but this time from the perspective of a man hitting middle age who is forced to re-examine his life. In the former, this happens literally: after dying in a car accident, Brooks's advertising exec heads to Judgment City where he goes on trial to see if he's "evolved" enough to move on to Heaven. The latter finds scifi author Brooks returning home to live with his mom in the hope that he'll come to understand the root of his problems with women.
Both films also served as excellent showcases for the lead actresses, Meryl Streep and Debbie Reynolds, providing them with the opportunity to move beyond their established screen images. Albert Brooks does the same thing for Sharon Stone in his latest comedy, The Muse.
"Her sexual image is tied to heavy dramas," he explains, "and I've never seen her be light and sexy. So we definitely had to de-Basic Instinct this woman."
Stone plays a professional muse who aids the creatively stumped in Hollywood, but the idea behind The Muse dates back to Brooks's infamous "running out of material" routine on The Tonight Show: What does someone do when the well of inspiration runs dry?
"I can't imagine anybody who is creative," says Brooks, "who doesn't think, 'Where's the next idea?' It's just such a natural thought, you know? I just try and harness that stuff. I try to harness anything that I really think about, which is sort of where my comedy comes from."
Albert Brooks is a self-described tortoise in a world of comedy hares, explaining that "early on, I think you make a decision of who you are and what you're going to do."
Which means he has no plans to stray from the road he's followed for the last thirty years.
"I've got my fans in the back of my head," he adds, "and I try as hard as I can to at least not make those people go, 'What the hell happened?'"
© 1999, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.