Modern Romance

This DVD was held off until May, so no one else will be able to see it until then, but I work at a video store and am therefore special.

Okay, Albert Brooks' low-key 1981 rom-com Modern Romance...This movie's often regarded, according to conventional wisdom, as a classic. The pinnacle of Brooks', um, craft or what have you. Back when he used to mine comedy out of the foibles of an everyday modern guy, rather than looking for comedy in the Muslim world, and apparently coming up short.

I'll tip you off right here at the top...Not much of an Albert Brooks fan. People always say that he's this alternate Woody Allen or something, but the similarities are superficial at best. Two neurotic Jews, from opposite coasts, made socially-observant, dryly funny films in the 70's and 80's that were kind of inwardly-focused. But Woody's a real filmmaker, a man who is just as capable of beautifully capturing a character (as in Annie Hall) or even a city (Manhattan) or an era (Zelig). Movies in which he appears, but where there is something else to be entertained by other than the rapier wit of Woody Allen.

Brooks is mainly good at making movies about himself and what a charmingly befuddled dude he can be. At his best, as in Lost in America, he manages to make his obsessions and anxieties universal. I mean, it's not just Albert Brooks who hates working for annoying bosses and being tied to a mortgage and responsibilities. Everyone dreams of breaking out from the ordinary and setting off on a grand adventure.

At his worst, Brooks is just some whiny little yutz who makes endless, dull films in which beautiful, nearly silent women redeem him for all his bizarre personality quirks. Modern Romance is one such film.

Clearly, the film is based on a failed relationship in Brooks' own life. I can't imagine you would bother to make up such a story. In the opening scene, film editor Robert Cole (the man himself) breaks up with his beautiful girlfriend Mary (Kathryn Harrold) in a Hamburger Hamlet. He says that they always fight, but implies that she has been sleeping around on him.

In the film's only consistantly funny sequence, Robert takes a bunch of qualuudes and stumbles around his apartment in a depressed daze. He puts on "A Fifth of Beethoven," that awful disco version of the Fifth Symphony, and dances around for a moment. He calls up a random number in his Rolodex and asks a stranger out on a romantic date. He calls his friend and assistant (Bruno Kirby) just to say "I love you." And he passes out in his car.

And there is some other amusing stuff in the movie. Passages featuring director/producer James L. Brooks (a non-actor who is no relation to Albert) as a wrong-headed director making a horrible sci-fi film starring George Kennedy work as comedy, but are pretty disconnected from the rest of the movie in terms of tone. One minute, you've got this kind of Cassavettes-lite, morbid take on the hopelessness of love in the modern world, and the next minute you've got fat old George Kennedy huffing it down a corridor in a Kubrickian space station.

To be honest, even though its cartoonishness is out of step with everything else in the film, I'd still rather see more of the George Kennedy movie-within-the-movie. Because the stuff with Brooks and his on-again off-again romance are pretty unbearable. Cole is about the least-sympathetic or charming character imaginable.

Here's Albert Brooks from the original press kit for Modern Romance, way back in 1981:

“There are no gags in the picture,” he says. “No zany comics. There are real people in real situations, carried to a logical – or illogical – extreme. If the outcome is funny, it’s because life itself is funny.”

What complete nonsense. Is this guy delusional? Not a single scene featuring protagonist Robert Cole is reasonable, logical or realistic. The guy is a lunatic. And not in a "crazy in love" kind of way, as Brooks likely intended. In an "Albert Brooks realizes the movie isn't funny so he throws in over-the-top schtick as a way to get cheap laughs."

Take an early scene in a Foot Locker-type store, featuring a cameo from Albert's brother Bob as an opportunistic shoe salesman (who would later become world-famous as Super Dave Osbourne). Cole has decided to "change his life" following the painful break-up with Mary by becoming a runner. So we get a gratuitous scene of him being suckered by the salesman, convinced to by all manner of unneccessary runner paraphanelia. Yawn. Brooks just keeps going and going with the gag, long after it has become painfully obvious. Again, the scene violates any sort of realism - Robert's a smart enough guy to know that you don't need all this expensive BS equipment, and he's not supposed to be wealthy and wouldn't be able to afford this crap. But Brooks needs a laugh, so in it goes.

It's only after Robert and Mary agree to get back together - at about the 45 minute mark - that Modern Romance goes from merely desperate to outright creepy. Robert turns out to be an extremely possessive, needy lover, and Mary responds by becoming distant and disinterested. The more we get a sense for the dynamic of their relationship, the more clear it becomes that this film applies to Brooks' own psychology and not to any kind of universal male response to romantic love.

I mean, sure, some men are possessive by nature, and everyone who's in love at times feels threatened and vulnerable. That's what it means to let someone into your life, to take a risk that they will betray your trust. But Robert's pretty much a maniac, and Mary seems nothing but sane and reasonable. I came to doubt not only that she would remain with such a tiring, nebbishy, pathetic man, but that she would have ever become interested in her in the first place.

In the film's final scene, a long-winded and very strange dialogue between Robert and Mary at an isolated cabin in the mountains, he implies that she's attracted to his jealousy. That she wants a man who will obsess over her and make her feel wanted. I suppose this is Brooks' notion of a happy ending - rather than pity the poor couple who can't work it out, we will rejoice that they have found someone who so perfectly compliments their personal quirks and idiosyncracies.

But, again, in some closing (and unfunny) titles, he has to ruin the entire point for a cheap laugh. Sigh.

Somehow, Modern Romance has garnered quite a reputation. I suppose the fact that it's so extremely self-indulgent and narrow is, in a way, groundbreaking. Few filmmakers would attempt to make a movie that's so clearly about nothing but their own inner life, the stray thoughts that whiz through their head while they're hanging out with their co-workers and girlfriends.

"Hey, you know what I did today? I cut a part of a film and I debated whether I should break up with my chick. I should make a movie about that! Those are some universal themes!"

Maybe it's the title. Modern Romance. You think you're going to see something about the nature of love, and instead you get a movie about how Albert Brooks always second-guesses himself, and sometimes lies to his mom about having plans to avoid talking to her for more than a minute or two.