Classic Movie Review Defending Your Life

Defending Your Life (1991) 

Directed by Albert Brooks 

Written by Albert Brooks 

Starring Albert Brooks, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn, Lee Grant

Release Date March 22nd, 1991

Published November 14th, 2023 

If I could choose what the afterlife looks like, I'd want it to look like the afterlife as presented by Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life. As both an idyllic and, ultimately positive take on life and death, Defending Your Life has a strong philosophical underpinning. The idea is that you go to Judgment City, you defend the life you live, try to prove that you overcame the fears that held you back in your previous life, and if you did, you get to move on to a nebulous afterlife that we can only assume is some kind of unending paradise. 

For all of the meta-gags, the performative pomposity and cluelessness, that marks the Albert Brooks character, Brooks' sincere world building in Defending Your Life is inspired. Brooks plays Daniel Miller, an ad executive who buys a new car and immediately gets himself killed in an accident. Arriving in Judgment City, Daniel thinks he's in heaven. The reality however, is different. No, he's not in hell. Hell doesn't exist in this universe. Judgment City is where one goes to defend the life they lived in hopes of moving on to the next place. 

If you fail, no big deal. If you fail, you just go back to Earth and live another life. You can do this as often as it takes to finally get it right. At a certain point, yes, you may be flung into to the universe with nowhere to go, but that's just for people who've failed a lot and show no interest in moving forward. Nothing to actually worry about. That's what Rip Torn's character, Daniel's advocate in Judgment City, Bob Diamond says with confidence that he's letting you in on a comforting secret that isn't as comforting as he thinks it is. 

Torn is Academy Award level brilliant in the role of Bob Diamond. Bob Diamond will present Daniel's life to a pair of judges who will determine whether or not he overcame his fears enough to be worthy of moving on. Standing opposite Bob and Daniel is Lena Foster (Lee Grant), a shark-like prosecutor who aims to use Daniel's life choices against him to keep him from moving on. In this universe, anything you have ever done has been recorded and is accessible as a video file. To give a sense of fairness, only a specific number of days from your life will be chosen to be looked at. The more days being used in your trial, don't call it a trial, but it's a trial, the harder it can be to move on. 

There is a running gag in Defending Your Life where small talk inevitably leads to people asking Daniel 'how many days' and when he says '9,' the residents of Judgment City each cringe and wish him luck. One kind restaurant owner, upon hearing Daniel say 9 days immediately gifts him dozens of pies. This sounds insane but one of the perks of Judgment City is that its adjacency to Heaven means the food is incredible and you can eat as much of it as you want. That's the kind of perk of the afterlife we can all get behind. 

Daniel's afterlife is changed forever when he meets Julia, one of the few people who died relatively young like himself. They bond as Daniel heckles a terrible comedian at a nightclub. Apparently comedy doesn't get the rub from Heaven as the food does. Julia immediately finds Daniel charming with the easy way he can make her laugh. In Streep's gentle, sweet, and assured comic performance, we can easily see why she would fall for Albert Brooks. She can see his emotional wounds and appears eager to help him heal, both because of her kindness and because she just likes the guy. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review The Humbling

The Humbling (2015) 

Directed by Barry Levinson 

Written by Buck Henry 

Starring Al Pacino, Greta Gerwig, Dianne Wiest, Nina Arianda, Charles Grodin, Kyra Sedgwick 

Release Date January 23rd, 2015 

Published January 17th, 2015 

The crazed, narcissistic, sexist, ludicrousness of "The Humbling" almost needs to be seen to be believed. I say “almost” because I really don't want you to waste your precious time watching this dreadful movie. Al Pacino has been wandering in the cinematic woods for years now. While he surrounds himself with talented people in "The Humbling," each is defeated equally by the film. Based on the novel by Phillip Roth, "The Humbling" stars Al Pacino as washed-up actor Simon Axler. Simon is beginning to lose his mind. On stage one night, in front of a disinterested crowd, Simon takes a header into the orchestra pit and winds up in a mental institution. 

Despite his tendency to share his narcissistic rambling with anyone, the talking cure doesn't seem to be working. Nevertheless, after 30 days Simon heads back to his empty mansion in Connecticut to recuperate. There, Simon is joined inexplicably by Pegeen (Greta Gerwig). Pegeen explains that she is the daughter of Simon’s old acting friends. Because she had a crush on him when she was 11, she says, she'd like to give up being a lesbian and be with him. This is, despite his impoverished living situation, his inability to work, and the fact that he is 66 years old and slowly losing his mind.

Here, director Barry Levinson and Pacino might have found a believable direction for "The Humbling" if they they followed through on Pegeen being a figment of Simon's imagination. There is briefly a hint that she's not real and if that had been the direction of the story, maybe the film would not be completely horrible. Instead, the film doubles down on the Pegeen character, rendering her the picture of a sexist fantasy and feminist nightmares. With Pegeen comes a series of reductive caricatures of women including not one, but two, stalker ex-girlfriends. One of them (Billy Porter) is now a man. The other one  is Louise (Kyra Sedgwick), whom Pegeen claims to have slept with in order to get her job as a university professor. I really wish I was making all of this up, but I am not.

Pegeen's arrival at Simon's home is among the more bizarre series of scenes in any movie in 2014. Pegeen arrives, introduces herself and then angrily begins to explain who she is. Why is she angry? Apparently it’s because Simon gave her a ring when she was 11 years old and she thought it meant they were married. It's impossible to tell if this dialogue is meant as a joke, because Greta Gerwig plays the scene with a bizarre, haughty intensity that doesn't fit the scene if it is indeed intended as a joke. It probably should be funny but it is most certainly not. 

That scene somehow ends in a kiss between Pegeen and Simon which is as creepy and awkward as you would imagine between 66 year old Al Pacino and a much, much, much younger woman. Then Simon and Pegeen begin playing with a toy train. Again, all of this is played straight, as if nothing remarkable or unusual has happened. A lesbian has just switched gender preference to be with a man old enough to be her grandfather and now they are playing with toy trains. That sounds like someone describing a fever dream.

The Humbling somehow manages to get weirder and more repellent. "The Humbling" contains a subplot in which a woman named Sybil (Nina Arianda), whom Simon met while he was committed to the asylum, (funny joke, right? Sybil in a mental hospital), Sybil wants Simon to kill her husband. After Simon is released from the hospital, Sybil stalks him and continues to try to hire him to kill her husband. Why? Because in "The Humbling" all women are completely insane.

Oh, but wait dear reader, director Barry Levinson and writer Buck Henry  he film have a cop-out for all of this sexist bullshit on display: Simon is an unreliable narrator. Simon may be suffering from Alzheimer’s or a more simple form of age-related memory loss. As he narrates the story, he can't remember it well. He talks to Pegeen when she's not there. He may be inventing all of this story or none of it. "The Humbling" is a grand, disturbed, mess of a movie that inspires bafflement over those involved in its creation. The once great Levinson continues his 17-year run of terrible films and takes the once-great screenwriter Buck Henry down with him. Henry hadn't had a screenplay credit in 19 years (his sharp wit last crafted the Nicole Kidman movie "To Die For"). He should have remained retired.

Greta Gerwig, Kyra Sedgwick, Dianne Wiest, who plays Gerwig's mother in the film, and the wonderful Charles Grodin also get dragged down into the muck of Pacino's continuing decline. I can't imagine what each of these fine performers thought that they were getting into in "The Humbling," but I am sure they cannot be happy with the outcome. Repeatedly throughout the film, Simon goes meta and muses about how people only want to see him return to the stage to watch the freak, the car wreck in progress. I doubt Pacino recognizes this musing as a commentary on his own career. But indeed there is only that reason to watch a Pacino movie these days. I keep watching Pacino in part because it is my job and in part because I just don't think it can get any worse, and then it does.

"The Humbling" is the latest rock bottom for the once-great Pacino.