Did it take The Real World to reveal how visionary Albert Brooks' directorial debut is? Actually, the parodical template is PBS's 1973 "reality TV" series An American Family, though the premise has roots in the earliest documentaries, in the notion (pace Flaherty) that the camera can't help but interfere in the reality it records. The vérité experiment is an ethnographic study organized by Brooks, who stars as "himself," a comic-turned-filmmaker equipped with trainloads of abrasive insincerity -- after serenading the Phoenix sect with a rendition of "Something's Gotta Give," he's off to inaugurate the program with his subject, a "normal" nuclear family (headed by Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain) chosen to have their daily life recorded for the next year by a crew in cumbersome diver-helmet cameras. "Be yourselves" is the lone direction, but the first day is barely done and the menstruating wife is taking off, only to come back full of extramarital thoughts toward the director; meanwhile, Brooks worries that his "leading actor" is coming off as unsympathetic, and studio heads (present via speaker phone) push for big-star replacements. The funniest of Brooks' satires of American complacency, it is also his most rigorous, the awareness of every moment recorded and watched adding to the reportage-involvement blur and bringing quotidian suburban suffering painfully to the fore. (In that sense, the film gazes ahead not only to Survivor, but also to Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent.) Still, if Brooks skewers the family's depressed complicity in its own manipulation, he saves the longest knifes for himself -- right and center, he places himself as the ultimate egotistical schmuck, ultimately turning the lenses on his own meltdown before coming to terms with his role as the drama's metteur en scène and frenetically orchestrating its literally scorching climax. Co-written with Monica Johnson and Harry Shearer. With J.A. Preston, Matthew Tobin, Lisa Urette, and Robert Stirrat.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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