#39 — Real Life (Albert Brooks, 1979)
The reputation of the debut directorial effort by Albert Brooks is so bolstered by the seeming prescience of its premise that it can be easy to lose sight of the detail that the comic genius wasn’t actually trying his hand as a futurist, but was instead reacting to and satirizing a television program from years earlier. An American Family aired on PBS in 1973, providing an intimate, supposedly unadorned glimpse at the collective life of the Louds, a seemingly prototypical middle class clan that melted down under the relentless scrutiny of the cameras. In Real Life, Brooks mocks the series as he stages his own fictional documentary about the making of a similar film project, shot with unique cameras that fit over the crew member’s heads like Stormtrooper helmets. In showing the ways that the filmmaker played by Brooks immediately starts manipulating the family he’s following in order to get better footage than their mundane lives are likely to yield, Real Life anticipates the forcefulness phoniness of the reality television genre that would follow years later.

In the late seventies, there could have hardly been a better comic pairing than Brooks and Charles Grodin, who plays the patriarch of the family. Both had a fierce, instinctual conviction to wring comedy from anxiety and discomfort. They constantly feel like they’re moving at a perpendicular to the rest of the world, banging into deeply settled cultural norms, wincing as they back away but also looking at the pathetically inane people that were part of the collision with a sort of withering disdain. For as much as their respective styles share, Brooks is almost kinetic in his motormouth intelligence and Grodin is withdrawn to the point of drifting into a contemptuous catatonia. Setting them to clash against one another is pure inspiration. Just put the two in the same shot and the comic tension automatically rises.

A major part of the brilliance of Brooks’s comedy, especially when he was really making his name in the nineteen-seventies, came from his combination of grounded sensibility and abstract thinking, paradoxically merged qualities that are evident all the way through Real Life. He is focused on the dull intricacies of how people struggle to relate to others, but also comes up with splendidly odd details that are funny simply by their imagined existence. The previously mentioned cameras are a prime example of this, as are the arch research institutions that are instrumental in the set-up of the film. Brooks is observational by nature, which still doesn’t prevent him from finding the humor in presenting deadpan absurdity. He’s not one of those creators who will go anywhere for a laugh–Brooks is far too precise to indulge that desperately–but he’s prepared to find worthy material anywhere. Worthiness will always be the key, though.

As pertinent as Real Life may seem when viewed through the lens of modern media, it’s not the prognostication skills of Brooks that makes that so. Instead, it’s his dedication to the moment when he was making the film. It wasn’t through supposition that he read the future. Instead, it was by honestly, deeply considering how human nature played itself out that Brooks perfectly envisioned the crass, opportunistic mass communication to come.