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It doesn't take years of "reality TV" to see the genius of this, a double-bill with Godard's Numéro Deux will do. The template is the domestic ethnography of PBS, Albert Brooks comes to it with cumbersome helmet-cameras and loads of self-absorbed abrasion. Playing comic-cum-documentarian "Albert Brooks," he serenades Phoenix locals with an updated version of "Something's Gotta Give" before inaugurating the experiment, a year-long record of a nuclear family headed by Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain. "Be yourselves" is the sole direction, the first day of filming is barely over and the irritable wife has already taken off. As the months pass, the filmmaker frets about his "leading man" coming off as unsympathetic, studio bosses push for celebrity replacements, and the clan's submerged despair rises to the surface. "You started out with this artsy-craftsy reality crap and what did you end up with? The news, the goddamned news!" The first of Brooks' analytical comedies is his funniest and most rigorous, built with subtle whiffs of Kubrick and anchored by the awareness of every moment being recorded and watched. A work of vacant spaces, of the distance between reportage and involvement, or between psychiatric meetings and showbiz focus groups. The matter of "altering the reality you film" is what one contemplates with Flaherty or Warhol, here the director is not averse to hitting on the wife if it means advancing the narrative. "You think you have it bad? I got to deal with people like John Simon and Rex Reed!" Brooks registers the family's complicity in its own manipulation, though he saves the sharpest knives for his character—the schmuck-artist chasing the specter of vérité until the literally incendiary inspiration of taking control of the mise en scène. Haneke in The Seventh Continent meticulously drains the joke. With J.A. Preston, Matthew Tobin, Lisa Urette, and Robert Stirrat.
--- Fernando F. Croce |