True Fakery

By Frank Rich

REAL LIFE

Directed by Albert Brooks Screenplay by Albert Brooks, Monica Johnson and Harry Shearer

When a comedian makes a film, audiences come to the theater planning to laugh their heads off. Such expectations are best set aside by moviegoers who venture to see Real Life. Comic Albert Brooks' first feature is not as dark as Interiors, but neither is it designed as a hoot. What Brooks has wrought is a scrupulously honest satire: a film that sacrifices compulsive jokiness in the effort to reveal the nasty truth about its subject, TV's slice-of-life documentaries. Real Life is funny when it wants to be and stubbornly thoughtful the rest of the time. By refusing to pander to the crowd, Brooks puts a healthy distance between himself and such recent comics turned film makers as Marty Feldman, Gene Wilder, and Cheech and Chong.

The satirical target of Real Life is rather fetchingly esoteric. Inspired by PBS's series about the Louds, An American Family, Brooks has staged his own confrontation between show-biz folk and so-called real people. In Real Life, the comedian plays himself, an entertainer who is making a documentary about a typical American family, the Yeagers of Phoenix (played by Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain). But Brooks takes An American Family one step further: he records not only the Yeagers' daily activities but also his own. In other words, Real

Life is a fictional movie about a real-life comic recording the "real life" of fiction al characters. Does that make sense?

Well, about as much as An American Family did in 1973.

At its best, Real Life graphically illustrates the absurdity of television's reality mongers, from the cinema verite specialists at PBS to Charles Kuralt at CBS.

When Brooks arrives in Phoenix to begin his film, everything goes wrong. He follows Mrs. Yeager to her gynecologist, only to learn that the doctor (Johnny Haymer) has already enjoyed TV stardom in a 60 Minutes expose of "baby slave auctions." Yeager himself proves to be the most colorless veterinarian ever recorded on film. Local eyewitness-news teams descend on the Yeagers, transforming a TV stunt into a media circus. Finally, an exasperated studio chief (played as a disembodied speaker-phone voice by real-life Studio Executive Jennings Lang) clamps down on the project. He sternly reminds Brooks that reality, like any other Hollywood commodity, needs packaging (that is, fakery) in order to sell.

The cast is uniformly fine, and some of the writing is inspired. There is a wonderful opening sequence in which Brooks enlists the cooperation of Phoenix's stodgy community leaders by shamelessly flattering the banality of their lives and then bursting into a Vegas routine. Later on we see a slow-motion montage intended to capture the romance of the Yeagers' visit to a shopping center. Even the film's occasional arid sections are carried by Brooks' sophisticated social insights.

Though Real Life is light on real jokes, it is the work of a real and engaging sensibility. -- Frank Rich

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