MOVIE REVIEW : Albert Brooks, This Is Your Comic Afterlife

Albert Brooks seems to make movies when it becomes impossible for him not to, when “normal” life goes too far not to need a comment or two. At the core of Brooks’ humor there’s the sense of the mensch who’s had it; of an observer who takes a central theme and embroiders it with the particular inanities that have struck him recently.

Brooks’ “Real Life,” in 1979, took a look at that era’s rage, documentary chic: families baring all to only-too-willing documentarians. In his comic way, Brooks not only worried about the psychic fallout, he was dubious about the very ground rules of the form. How could a family be themselves, he wondered subversively, if they first had to pretend that an army of filmmakers crouched in their breakfast nooks, shower stalls and back seats simply weren’t there?

In his high-water mark, 1985’s “Lost in America,” Brooks targeted yuppie dropouts--inadvertent or otherwise--selling themselves on the idea that they were their generation’s Easy Riders.

Of late, Brooks seems to have been giving some thought to the afterlife . . . and the one that precedes it; the result is “Defending Your Life” (Bruin Theater), an intermittently funny if unsteady mixture of first-rate Brooks Angst, and set-ups that never quite pay off.

Most of the funny stuff is bunched toward the front, like Brooks’ views on the owning of Jeeps and Land Rovers by people who’ve never been in any rougher terrain than the Beverly Center. In the afterlife, as the course of true love begins to preoccupy him, Brooks get entirely too well-mannered for our own good. Aside from his splendid reenactment of some of the joys of snowmobiling, this is very tepid Brooks indeed.

Brooks’ alter ego, Daniel Miller, is thrown into his heavenly quandary quickly. After a car crash that ends his birthday and his life, Brooks finds himself in what looks like a heavenly Universal Studios Tour; unmarked, side-loaded busses full of mostly older men and women who, like him, look glazed as a doughnut.

They’re whisked to the dreadful impersonality of this overworld Continental Hotel, where Brooks is told to get a good night’s rest and provided with his tupa, a sort of belted shroud, uninteresting on nearly everyone. It’s not heaven, of course, it’s a vast, generic sorting center, part resort village, part boring-looking government complex. (It’s the perfect use of the West Los Angeles Federal Building.) There, as Brooks learns from his overworldly attorney Bob Diamond (Rip Torn), he must make the best case he can for his behavior on Earth.

As writer and director, Brooks has a benign take on the afterlife, far more Buddhist than hellfire and damnation: one does one’s life until it’s done right and only then can one move on to higher planes of existence. In this trial form, there is a quick and nimble prosecutor (Lee Grant), one man and one woman judge, and a distinct sense of deja vu to the testimony: scenes from This Was Your Life, Daniel Miller.

Nice idea--except that going back to do Earth time again doesn’t seem like much of a threat, even when we learn that earthlings use only a mortifying 3% of their brains. So writer Brooks ups the ante, introducing Meryl Streep’s Julia, smart, warm, funny and heroic, an absolute cinch for the higher plane. She is booked instantly into the Majestic Hotel--no tacky Continentals for her--her life-review period is a breeze, her judges jostle for the chance to take her to dinner . . . and she falls for Daniel almost as quickly as he is smitten by her.

Streep must have had the challenge of her career, willing Julia into any kind of interesting life, because with every good intention Brooks has written a character as substantial as a hologram. Since she has almost nothing to play, Streep gets around it by managing to suggest that this is what intimacy with her would be like, that it would be all twinkling innuendo and shared confidences, but before the movie’s final scene, we may not quite know why Brooks should have all the luck. In spite of Torn’s every parry, the prosecutor’s examples, presenting Brooks as indecisive, compromising and nerdy, are peculiarly compelling.

Even Brooks’ own premise of a mundane mid-heaven work station conspires against him. This banal setting looks just as stultifying as it’s supposed to, so there’s nothing to divert us visually. Cinematographer Allen Daviau is scrupulous not to add anything extraneous that would make this sterile place electrifying looking. And aside from Rip Torn, who hasn’t had this much fun with a character since “Songwriter,” there are virtually no other actors to distract us, and a complete waste of Buck Henry, who could.

The singular thing about this afterlife is that you can eat all you want and not worry about adding a single calorie. Unfortunately for rabid Brooks fans, it’s a little too close a metaphor for “Defending Your Life” itself.

‘Defending Your Life’

Albert Brooks: Daniel Miller

Meryl Streep: Julia

Rip Torn: Bob Diamond

Lee Grant: Lena Foster

Buck Henry: Dick Stanley

A Geffen Film Co. presentation of a Warner Bros. release. Producer Michael Grillo. Co-producer/production manager Robert Grand. Executive producer Herbert S. Nanas. Camera Allen Daviau. Production design Ira Random. Editor David Finfer. Costumes Deborah Scott. Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG-13 (scrupulously lacking in naughty words or actions)