Defending Your Life (1991, Albert Brooks)

68/100

Second viewing, last seen during its original theatrical release. (Though I anticipated so much of the dialogue that it must've been on heavy rotation at the video store where I worked in '91 and early '92.) What I'd recalled most vividly was feeling disappointed by the film's heavy emphasis on the importance of facing one's fears, which sometimes made the film come across like a self-help manual flimsily disguised as satire. And I still don't much care for that aspect, even if it's amusing that the prosecution's examples of Daniel's cowardice consistently involve him making less money than he otherwise potentially might have. Just too earnest for my taste, especially given Brooks' usually lacerating comic sensibility. We even get a riff on The Graduate's ending—guy desperately pounding on a door, couple "escaping" on a bus—minus the crucial deflating now-what? uncertainty. It's just straightforwardly triumphant. Not what I expected from Brooks at the time. Having since endured the therapeutic mediocrity that was Mother, as well as The Muse's utter lameness (opening sentence of my contemporaneous review: "Is it legal for an Albert Brooks movie to be this resoundingly awful?"), I'm more inclined to forgive Defending Your Life's Aesopian moral and enjoy its vision of the afterlife as bureaucratic way-station—itself not blazingly original, but placing the neurotic Brooks persona in that environment, where he can be envious of other dead people's nicer hotels and worry about how many days from his life are to be reviewed ("Nine days!" merrily shout the sushi restaurant workers in unison), pretty much guarantees laughs. Brooks gets so much mileage just from shots of himself slowly, sheepishly turning back around in his chair to face the judges after having watched yet another mortifying moment from his past. A rare case of him using silence rather than his character's need to fill any silence.

(That's Ed, the funniest thing in this movie to me has nothing whatsoever to do with the afterlife or the not-a-trial or the romance. I have to believe it's something Brooks witnessed somehow, just because it's so completely random. During the childhood "flashback" that sees young Daniel cover for his friend at school by pretending he's the one who forgot to bring his art supplies, the teacher asks the class how much the paints cost, and gets a response in unison: "Ten dollars." Then he asks the cost of the brushes, and half the kids shout "Three dollars" while the other half shout "Three-fifty." So altogether that's? HALF THE CLASS: "Thirteen dollars." HALF THE CLASS: "Thirteen fifty." Can't explain why I find that so hilarious. I just do.)

Then there's Streep, whose performance here is a miracle of enveloping warmth and flirtatious teasing. It's easy to believe that Daniel instantly falls in love with her, because who wouldn't? At the time, Streep had been shifting away from her trademark heavily-accented dramatic roles, but the characters she played in She-Devil and Postcards From the Edge weren't exactly what you'd call likeable. Julia's literally nothing but likeable, idealized to the point where it arguably starts to hurt the movie a little. Streep gives her exactly one moment of very light edge, fake-smiling her way through the line "I'm gonna go to the ladies room. I pray to god when I get back [kisses his cheek], you've changed." And frankly even that makes her more attractive, at least to my mind. Everything involving Julia plays as if she were an afterlife plant—not actually a fellow recently dead person at all, but someone expressly testing Daniel's resolve. A dream girl engineered for him personally, based on their knowledge of his entire life. Dunno whether that would've worked for me, but some sort of puncturing might have made Defending Your Life seem less didactically programmatic. At the same time, though, Streep and Brooks have such delightful, breezy chemistry in their various courtship scenes that I can't judge the romance too harshly. Back in 1991, I expected to love this picture, and felt let down; this time, it reflects its protagonist: deeply flawed, but fundamentally good.