Albert Brooks has always been one of the most brilliant, innovative Jewish American comedians and he is the subject of the new HBO documentary, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, which was made with loving care by his BFF, director Rob Reiner. It will become available on Yes VOD and Sting TV, as well as HOT and Cellcom TV on November 12, .
If you know Brooks and his comedy, you’ll be eager to see this movie, and if you’re not familiar with him, this is a great way to find out who he is. The documentary paints an affectionate portrait of him, through conversations between him and Reiner in a restaurant, over coffee and cheesecake, as well as with clips from every phase of his career and interviews with the wife he married late in life, his children, his brothers, and colleagues.
Brooks was born to a showbiz family in Los Angeles. His father was a comedian named Harry Einstein, who was famous for playing a Greek character, and his parents couldn’t resist naming him Albert Einstein, although it was understandable that he changed his last name when he was young.
Reiner recalls how his own father, legendary comedy writer Carl Reiner, thought Brooks was the funniest person he had ever met, even when Brooks was still a teen.
Brooks’s comedy career took off quickly, as he made appearances on variety shows, where he perfected a brand of off-kilter humor that is hard to categorize. One of the easiest bits to describe is one in which he plays a mime who won’t shut up. Later he made a series of short films for Saturday Night Live, which was originally going to be a showcase for him, but according to what he tells Reiner here, he talked Lorne Michaels into having a rotating host every week, and thanks to him, the SNL we know was born.
He went on to write, direct, and star in a series of celebrated comic films, but for some reason – perhaps they are just too quirky – he never had the kind of career that Woody Allen did. Reiner presents and Brooks discusses the movies he has made. These include his first and crazily prescient film, Real Life, made in 1979, about a director making a documentary about a real family, inspired by the series, An American Family, which seems to predict the reality TV craze that took place decades later.
In Lost in America, he plays an advertising executive who tries and fails to go off the grid with his wife, played by Julie Haggerty. Quoting its lines out of context wouldn’t do them justice and I only wish it were available to stream here.
His 1991 film, Defending Your Life, co-starred Meryl Streep in a fantasy about an afterlife where you have to convince a jury why you deserve to go to heaven. In 1996, he made Mother, a criminally underrated movie co-starring Debbie Reynolds in the story of a complicated mother-son relationship, that had the tagline, “Nobody misunderstands you better.” I wished they had spent more time on his 2005 mockumentary/documentary, Searching for Comedy in the Muslim World, a movie I fear would seem sadly dated now.
The movie also looks at his wonderful acting career, and his key roles in such films as Taxi Driver, Out of Sight, and Drive, and voicing the role of the father in Finding Nemo. But the zenith of his acting career for most Brooks fans is his role as a brainy, nervous reporter in Broadcast News, a role director James L. Brooks wrote with him in mind, in which he delivers the unforgettable lines, “Wouldn’t this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If needy were a turn-on?” Brooks delivered these words as no one else could.
This is one of the rare times when a documentary is much too short. I would have liked to see many more clips from Brooks’s standup routines and more about his movies. Much of the running time is taken up with accolades from fellow comics, such as Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, David Letterman, and others. I would have liked to see more Brooks. Maybe if this film is a hit, he and Reiner can get together and record a conversation over coffee and cheesecake every year.
What else is on TV and streaming in Israel?
THERE IS crazy, very crazy, and then there’s Diana Nyad, the subject of the new Netflix movie, Nyad, about the long-distance swimmer who managed to complete the hellishly difficult swim from Cuba to Key West at the age of 64. Long-distance swimming may be the most boring sport in the world to watch, but this movie finds the drama in her story, from her prickly, self-centered personality that keeps her isolated and her relationship with her best friend, who becomes her trainer. Annette Bening is not afraid to seem unlikable in the title role and Jodie Foster is more appealing than she has been in years as her friend. Rhys Ifans, who played the crazy roommate in Notting Hill, portrays their navigator. I confess that I’ve been an admirer of Nyad since I was a kid and she swam around Manhattan, which seemed to me like the coolest thing anybody had ever done. At 28, she tried and failed to swim from Cuba to Florida, a swim which involves battling strong currents and coping with jellyfish and sharks. To think of attempting it at any age, you would have to be out of your mind, but to do it in your 60s is quite a magnificent obsession and this movie takes you along on this crazy journey.
Quiz Lady is a mildly enjoyable new movie on Disney+ (also available through Yes), about Annie, a young Asian-American woman played by the always entertaining Akwafina, who has nothing much going on in her life and dreams of going on a quiz show. Sandra Oh of Grey’s Anatomy plays her sister, and Will Ferrell is the show’s host.
Cellcom TV, like Yes, is getting some new shows from Amazon Prime. These include The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Man in the High Castle (a series that looks at what life would be like if the Nazis had conquered England during World War II and which may be particularly disturbing to watch now), Upload (a comedy about a future in which you can choose your afterlife like a virtual reality game), and Modern Love, the star-studded series inspired by the New York Times column.