Lost in America (Albert Brooks, 1985)
And so my obsession with Albert Brooks continues........
The thing that I like so much about him, the thing that makes Albert Brooks so brilliant is that he can make these really intelligent, biting, intuitive films and disguise them as innocuous comedies.
In Lost in America, Brooks plays a yuppie advertising executive, David, who's expecting a big promotion. He and his wife, Linda, have even up-graded their house, expecting all of their dreams to come true with this one promotion. Privately, Linda feels that her entire life is in a rut and that David's promotion won't change anything, even though David adamently feels that it's the key to the kingdom.
When David is passed over for the promotion, he loses it and tells off the boss, proclaiming that he used to laugh at his friends in college who went out to "find themselves" while he stuck it out in business school. So now he has the perfect opportunity to "drop out of society," sell everything, buy an RV with Linda, and find themselves. This decision leads to one of the funniest lines I've heard in awhile:
"This is like what we talked about when we were 19! We wanted to find ourselves, but we didn't have a dollar so we just watched TV."
And herein we see the biting, satiric humour of Brooks. The yuppies that he depicts always equate money with happiness, no matter the situation. In this case, finding themselves means having a comfortable nest egg to live off of. David needs money to find himself, a comfortable set-up in a fully-loaded RV. Nothing less will do.
When David and Linda experience real, actual poverty, they are less than pleased and will do anything to get out of it, back to the artificial, totally un-satisfying life that they knew. I found it quite telling that the film focused on Los Angeles and New York and passed by most of the interior of the States. That brilliant little move said a lot about the characters that Brooks presented: they're out of touch with reality and the struggles that normal people have to go through in places like Kansas, Wisconsin, and Alabama. For them, America is LA and NY and their attempt to dig deeper becomes merely a side-track on their pre-ordained journey to "find themselves."
The thing that I like so much about him, the thing that makes Albert Brooks so brilliant is that he can make these really intelligent, biting, intuitive films and disguise them as innocuous comedies.
In Lost in America, Brooks plays a yuppie advertising executive, David, who's expecting a big promotion. He and his wife, Linda, have even up-graded their house, expecting all of their dreams to come true with this one promotion. Privately, Linda feels that her entire life is in a rut and that David's promotion won't change anything, even though David adamently feels that it's the key to the kingdom.
When David is passed over for the promotion, he loses it and tells off the boss, proclaiming that he used to laugh at his friends in college who went out to "find themselves" while he stuck it out in business school. So now he has the perfect opportunity to "drop out of society," sell everything, buy an RV with Linda, and find themselves. This decision leads to one of the funniest lines I've heard in awhile:
"This is like what we talked about when we were 19! We wanted to find ourselves, but we didn't have a dollar so we just watched TV."
And herein we see the biting, satiric humour of Brooks. The yuppies that he depicts always equate money with happiness, no matter the situation. In this case, finding themselves means having a comfortable nest egg to live off of. David needs money to find himself, a comfortable set-up in a fully-loaded RV. Nothing less will do.
When David and Linda experience real, actual poverty, they are less than pleased and will do anything to get out of it, back to the artificial, totally un-satisfying life that they knew. I found it quite telling that the film focused on Los Angeles and New York and passed by most of the interior of the States. That brilliant little move said a lot about the characters that Brooks presented: they're out of touch with reality and the struggles that normal people have to go through in places like Kansas, Wisconsin, and Alabama. For them, America is LA and NY and their attempt to dig deeper becomes merely a side-track on their pre-ordained journey to "find themselves."