Blu-ray Review: Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life on the Criterion Collection

When Defending Your Life was released in 1991, it was the first film that Albert Brooks had penned without frequent collaborator Monica Johnson following a run of acerbic classics that included Modern Romance and Lost in America, both high-water marks in a decidedly low point for American comedy filmmaking. So well-defined was Brooks’s genially skeptical take on love, work, and life in general throughout those early films that the comparatively luminous Defending Your Life, which, despite its mystic, quasi-existential trappings, is resolutely and unabashedly a romantic comedy, even still feels like Brooks’s proverbial odd one out. At the same time, whereas all of his films examine the core of self-defeat that Brooks’s on-screen persona works hard to mask, Defending Your Life finds him challenged to examine it and, ultimately, transcend it. It’s the most generous film in his oeuvre and his most self-forgiving.

Right off the bat, the film gives ad executive Daniel Miller (Brooks) the benefit of the doubt in that, having been cut down on his 39th birthday when he carelessly drives his brand new car directly into an oncoming city bus, he hasn’t really had a fair shot at “doing the work” on himself, as it were. (In contrast, one can presume that Modern Romance’s Robert Cole will continue to agonize and antagonize his way through his relationship to Mary Harvard for decades to come after that film concludes.) Daniel, along with hundreds of elderly souls struggling to keep their heads upright, is whisked away to Judgement City, a resort-like way station for the recently deceased that offers every sort of earthly pleasure to keep guests amused while judges and case workers determine whether they have achieved admittance to the next stage of the afterlife or if they need to return to earth to give life another try. While shuttling downtown to begin his case, Daniel’s doddering seatmate mourns his death at such a young age. “AIDS?” she earnestly inquires, a punchline that’s both shocking and admirably efficient in underlining just how out of his element Daniel is in the moment.

Implicit in the surfeit of senior sojourners is the notion that those who have shuffled from the mortal coil at an age-appropriate point have already learned to take life’s pleasures where they can find them. Daniel, who responds to his Best Western-esque accommodations and huckster defense representative (not “lawyer” since, as everyone is quick to assure Daniel, no one in Judgement City is “on trial”) with the shrug of someone who doesn’t think he deserves any better, grudgingly consents to the indulgences that come his way—when a restaurant waiter finds out he likes shrimp, he summons a platter of dozens and said there’s more where that came from, and he won’t gain a single pound—rather than seeking them out. That is, until he meets Julia (Meryl Streep), whose becalmed sense of acceptance and joy is palpable. Whereas it seems as if Daniel has, at best, a 50-50 shot at avoiding a roundtrip ticket back to Earth, Julia very much feels destined to sail onto the next plane of heightened consciousness.

Defending Your Life is both the most workaday depiction of the afterlife ever mounted in American cinema and the most fanciful, high-concept effort that Brooks ever attempted. As if replicating Daniel’s struggle with fear and daring, the film wrestles with Brooks’s established sarcasm and his motivation to craft a crowd-pleaser and argue for happily-ever-afters in the bargain. No short order, as the comfort zone has never been his comfort zone. Brooks himself once said that he was attracted to filmmaking because “it was one of those places where you could actually do something that’s grating or emotionally unsatisfying.”

And yet, in saying so, even for the sake of bolstering his on-screen persona, Brooks sells himself short. Critic Dave Kehr once mused, “Albert Brooks has more in common with Ozu than with a great majority of his Hollywood counterparts: he’s one of the few American directors interested in the texture of the quotidian and the particular problems of its presentation…Brooks’s camera, while far more active than Ozu’s, also seems to be seeking a neutral, contemplative distance.” Defending Your Life is the antithesis to most of the rest of Brooks’s career, and the one film in his canon that proves Kehr’s thesis. For a film about metaphysical arbitration, it’s is the least judgmental one that Brooks ever made.

In depicting Daniel and Julia adjusting to their time in limbo, Defending Your Life offers its audience pleasures in equally bountiful measure as those enjoyed by its characters. Streep, by this point deep into her reinvention as an assured comedian that would a year later reach its apex in Death Becomes Her, transforms a role that on the page doesn’t offer much beyond unyielding nobility into a radiant study in paradoxically noble indulgence; Julia digging into a three-pound plate of spaghetti with gusto, grinning at others in the Italian restaurant as an infinite strand dangles from her mouth, is one of Streep’s indelible movie moments.

Elsewhere, Rip Torn’s turn as Daniel’s alternately jovial and pompous defender, Bob Diamond, just about set the tone for the next chapter in his career. Judgement City’s TV offerings, as Daniel flips through the channels upon arrival at his hotel, are a vignette of mundane surrealism. And then there’s the reaction—from groans to an incredulous “Oh my God”—of the observers at the Past Lives Pavilion upon discovering that their host is reincarnation spokesperson Shirley MacLaine. Even if Brooks hadn’t followed it up with Mother, in which his middle-aged avatar works to repair his strained relationship with his mom, Defending Your Life by itself justifies Brooks as among the most humane cynics in American comedy.

Image/Sound

Sporting a 4K restoration purported to have been scanned from Defending Your Life’s original negative, it’s hard to imagine the film looking much better than it does here, though the overall sheen of the cinematography has that peculiarly flat early-’90s pallor to it. A number of scenes early on boast an appropriately cold palette, and later ones involving Meryl Streep’s character lean warmer and more luxuriant. Aside from a few process shots in the film’s climax, which come off as visual plastic, there’s a surprisingly vintage-looking grain in the image. The 2.0 master audio surround mix is pristine, with the only drawback being the overly emphatic room it gives to Michael Gore’s borderline saccharine score.

Extras

As with Criterion’s earlier edition of Lost in America, the extras presented here are surprisingly sparse but also good enough. No commentary, no retrospective documentary, no behind-the-scenes footage, no deleted scenes, and no Streep. What you do get is Brooks during two eras—one contemporary to the film’s release and one brand new—discussing the film, first as part of a talk show panel that also includes co-stars Rip Torn and Lee Grant, and then in an extended, socially distanced conversation with filmmaker Robert Weide during which Brooks talks about how Defending Your Life has emerged as the one that he’s made that gets the most compliments from viewers. Brooks also delves into his takes on religion and death, and reveals that the punchline where his character heckles a stand-up comedian by telling him he’s dying, and then telling Streep’s character the comic is actually his father, was just a random joke and not at all based on the fact that his own real-life father died on stage while delivering a comedy routine. Quite a coincidence, in any case. Finally, there’s a featurette with critic and theologian Donna Bowman unpacking the film’s resonance in terms of Sartre and Kierkegaard. It’s smart enough to make one wish she’d tackled an entire commentary track.

Overall

While the bonus pleasures of Criterion’s release of Defending Your Life are sadly limited, the film’s own rewards are more than enough to compensate.