“A comedic tornado,” “the first alternative comic” and “one of the most original thinkers that we’ve ever seen” is how Steven Spielberg, Jon Stewart and Chris Rock describe Albert Brooks in Rob Reiner’s recent documentary Albert Brooks: Defending My Life. Born Albert Einstein, with a father and mother both in the show business game, Brooks seemingly emerged from the womb a performer, absorbing the energy of the comedy legends—including Milton Berle, Mel Brooks (no relation) and Rob’s father, Carl Reiner—who were regular fixtures around him growing up. With those talents fostering a new generation of comedians, it would have been easy for Brooks to follow in their tradition, but from an early age he cut out his own path.
“Deconstructionist genius” is another phrase Stewart uses in reference to Albert Brooks, a perfect way to explain the comedian’s unimaginable creativity and inventiveness—his remarkably dry wit and way of undercutting what the audience expects in order to deliver a knockout curveball from left field that puts you in stitches. Beginning his career as a stand-up, Brooks developed his punk rock brand of comedy through talk show stints in which he’d go on national television with a routine that he invented moments before going on air. He practically reinvented stand-up with appearances more akin to performance art and conceptual comedy, featuring characters like a mime who can’t stop verbally explaining his miming, a ventriloquist who among other things will have the dummy drink a glass of water while Brooks sings instead of the opposite, and an animal trainer who has an elephant who does unbelievable tricks… but the elephant got sick, so he’s doing his whole act with a frog taking place for the elephant.
Whatever you thought you understood about comedy, whatever expectation you had for where any performance would go, Brooks was determined to do the complete opposite. He’d have ideas that, if you explained them to a group of people in a pitch, would get you thrown into an asylum. Yet, he pulled them off in a way that made you question how the hell no one had ever thought of something so simple yet so genius.
This aura of “next big thing” that was surrounding Brooks by the mid-to-late 1970s was so stratospheric that he was approached by Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol with their idea for The Albert Brooks Show, a weekly variety program that would air on NBC on Saturday nights with Brooks as the regular host. Instead, Brooks suggested they should have rotating hosts, essentially inventing the format that would become Saturday Night Live. That wasn’t his only invention for the weekend staple: He also told the duo that instead of hosting, he wanted to make a series of short films, creating pre-recorded skits that set the blueprint for everything from The Lonely Island to Funny or Die and still remain a constant fixture of the program.
For five decades, Brooks has been reinventing the form of entertainment, and if that wasn’t enough he’s also proven himself an astute actor. Making his debut feature performance in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Brooks has popped up as (among other things) a flop-sweating newsman in Broadcast News (which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor) and a chilling crime lord in Drive, as well as delivering indelible voice performances in Finding Nemo as Marlin and in The Simpsons as numerous characters including Hank Scorpio. If that’s not enough, in 2011 he wrote a book titled 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America, a near-future dystopian tale of an earthquake that rattles the foundations of society and opens up the massive chasms that have been building between cultures and generations.
A man of many talents, the most complete formation of Albert Brooks’ genius comes in the movies he’s directed. A scarce seven to date, with the most recent released a whopping 20 years ago, Brooks (along with frequent co-writer Monica Johnson) has honed a legacy of astute observations on how we interact with each other and the world. Brooks always cast himself in the leading role, as he was unafraid to be ugly, destructive and completely out of control on screen. Seven feels like far too few movies for someone with as distinct a gift as Brooks, yet we’re lucky to have these seven at all, so why not rank them?
Here is every Albert Brooks movie, ranked:
7. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2005)
If you’ll recall, things were pretty weird in the years following September 11, 2001. Hollywood, as they’re wont to do, sought to address this weirdness with soft satires of the U.S. government and events in the Middle East, along with hard-hitting awards-bait dramas. Neither approach really took off, with this period in American cinema largely a mid-2000s blip apart from Kathryn Bigelow’s one-two punch of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Among the movies that fell into a cultural ether rarely to be discussed again was Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World.
Initially set up with Sony Pictures, the studio balked at Brooks’ insistence on having the word “Muslim” in the title, instead desiring to call it simply Looking for Comedy. A total affront to the entire point of the project, Brooks moved the film over to Warner Independent Pictures, who quietly premiered it at the Dubai International Film Festival in December 2005, three months after the Jyllands-Posten Danish cartoons controversy. The film was released to audiences in January 2006, a dump damning it as a total catastrophe—it grossed less than $1 million worldwide on a $10 million budget and is to date the last feature Brooks has directed.
Brooks had his heart in the right place. Noticing the rise of Islamophobia in response to 9/11, Brooks explicitly intended to make a picture about the idea that Americans were afraid to even utter the word “Muslim.” “There are a billion-and-a-half Muslim people on this planet, and I never thought that all of them wanted us dead,” Brooks said. “I thought, what could I do to make a movie in my style to sort of soften this subject.” In Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, Brooks (playing himself) is tasked by the U.S. government to go to India and Pakistan to understand what makes Muslims laugh—it’s a new tactic to try and understand better these people the U.S. doesn’t know much about, instead of the old approach of surveilling them.
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World has some quality elements, including a standout sequence where Brooks performs a show in New Delhi that is completely tanking, so he stops and suggests that maybe things aren’t going well because the crowd doesn’t understand him. He asks the audience to raise their hand if they speak English, expecting crickets, but instead every single person puts their hand up. It’s a sharp moment that emphasizes how Brooks wisely makes the majority of the jokes about his own character’s ignorance. Sadly, there’s not much more material like this over the course of the picture, which is often not incisive enough to succeed as satire.
6. The Muse (1999)
What makes a creative really spark in Hollywood? Is it raw talent? Honing your skills over time? Nepotism giving you the leg up? Blind luck? The Muse presents Albert Brooks as flailing screenwriter Steven Phillips, whose latest action script is being turned down amid word around town that he’s got “no edge.” Despite receiving a lifetime achievement award, his agent tells him that he’s past his prime and being let go. Desperate to latch onto anything, Phillips buys into his best friend Jack’s (Jeff Bridges) tale of a local muse (Sharon Stone) who provides inspiration for those in need. But that musing comes at a price. Essentially put into a sugar daddy situation, Phillips must be at the muse’s beck and call while scrounging for drops of gold to turn his career around.
The Muse charmingly posits questions of how much does one’s juice come from within, and how much from some external, perhaps even mystical force? As Phillips begins to craft a new concept—a comedy starring Jim Carrey as a new aquarium owner—there remains questions over whether this muse is just some kind of a placebo. Is something only true because you believe it? There are fun ideas at play here, though The Muse certainly isn’t sharp enough to be an industry satire on the level of something like The Player. Its relatively tame surface, an ironic lack of edge from Brooks as a writer and director, saps some of the venom.
Yet, Stone is a showstopper as the seductive and at times infuriating title character, with the story picking up steam as she becomes friendly with Phillips’ wife, played by a delightful Andie MacDowell. Initially resistant to the idea of the muse’s involvement, and her husband’s devotion to this new woman, MacDowell’s character is fully on board when the muse suddenly helps her launch a successful new cookie business. It’s a welcome deviation as the initial plot becomes a bit stale. Though without question, the most memorable aspect of The Muse is the litany of celebrity cameos receiving creative blessing from the muse. This includes a post-Titanic James Cameron, who is told not to go back to the water anytime soon, and a manic Martin Scorsese who talks about doing a remake of Raging Bull except “this time I’m doing it with a real thin guy.”
5. Mother (1996)
Many of Albert Brooks’ early pictures center around his characters’ romantic relationships with women, and Mother starts off in a similar place. After finalizing his second divorce, John Henderson (Brooks) returns to his sad, empty home and—in a classic extended Brooks gag—meticulously maneuvers his one pathetic recliner and dreary little side table around his vacant living room, trying to find the spot for them that’ll somehow fix the hole in his heart. Seeking answers elsewhere, Henderson recognizes that perhaps the failures of his relationships comes from deeper down, something ingrained in his core. For the first time in Brooks’ career, he takes the opportunity to probe the dynamic with his mother. After being away from the acting game for over 20 years, Debbie Reynolds portrays Beatrice Henderson, with the film centering around John’s attempts to unpack his damaging history with his mother by moving back in with her.
In the documentary Defending My Life, Brooks tells Rob Reiner how his own mother was an incredible singer who starred in movies with his father, but then put her career aside to raise children. Whenever he would talk to his mother about his work, particularly his appearances on Johnny Carson, he found himself wanting more of a response from her. Eventually it dawned on him that maybe she didn’t want to talk about that stuff because she always harbored some resentment towards him and his siblings. You can feel that personal conflict surging through Brooks as he directs and co-writes (with Monica Johnson) this story of a son attempting to use his mother to understand himself, only to realize that for the first time he’s able to see his mother as her own person—one with just as many, if not more, shattered dreams as him.
Lest I make things sound too morose, Mother is also packed with some hysterical bits. Reynolds pulls out a several-years-old block of cheese from her freezer that seems to weigh 30 pounds, yet she insists it’s still in good condition because she froze it—just like the cheap container of ice cream she pulls out and the “protective layer of ice” that keeps it fresh. Like Brooks’ best work, there’s an aura of comfort and familiarity, of warmth amidst the neuroses, but there’s self-effacing acidity underneath.
4. Defending Your Life (1991)
When we envision how the afterlife is conveyed according to cinema, we immediately conjure up images of puffy clouds, bright lights, harps and golden palaces. In Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks questions that stereotype, instead transporting advertising executive Daniel Miller (Brooks)—killed in an accident while rifling for some CDs that fell on the floor of his new sports car—to a Great Beyond that more or less looks like a Florida retirement resort. Here, Daniel discovers that he’s not in Heaven, but instead a sort of transitional plane where everyone is placed on trial and forced to witness various scenes from their lives in order to determine how much of their existence was controlled by fear. Based on the judges’ ruling, if you lived your life without fear you can move on to the next place, and if you didn’t then you’re sent back to Earth to try again.
It’s a bold, fascinating concept that feels true to the heart of someone like Brooks, a man who has made neuroses an integral part of his artistic brand. The conceit of Judgment City alone is enough to make Defending Your Life a standout picture, with viewers bombarded by a litany of whip-smart dialogue establishing the tone of this setting and the picture overall. Clever barbs include Rip Torn (as Brooks’ trial lawyer) explaining how folks working in the afterlife use far more of their brains than people on Earth—Torn uses 47% of his, while Brooks uses a mere 3%.
While this world and all of its details are rich and entertaining, the throughline for Defending Your Life is the touching romance between Brooks and Meryl Streep, playing a fellow defender whose trial consists of scenes of her saving her children and pets from a burning building while even her prosecutor is crying and praising her selfless life. Streep seems an unusual piece of casting for a Brooks picture (even Brooks agrees, describing how he initially thought the actress was “extremely unapproachable” and far too hifalutin to want to be in his movie, but that she’s actually “so average it’s ridiculous”), but it’s a gift seeing her portray such lightness. She’s such a calming presence that you can’t help but recognize how this woman soothes everyone around her.
3. Lost in America (1985)
Many of us feel the temptation to throw our entire lives away and start over from scratch, but how many actually have the courage to do so? More importantly, who among us has the privilege to be able to do such a thing? Lost in America begins with the first question, and in doing so subtly navigates the second, as typical Los Angeles yuppies David and Linda Howard (Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty) sell their house, liquidate their assets and drop out of society to travel across the country in a Winnebago. David puffs his chest out and talks about this idea as if they are a couple of grand explorers setting sail on the open road “like in Easy Rider,” but at all times he seeks comfort in the $145,000 they have in their back pocket as their “nest egg.” Even when throwing it all away and going off the grid with faux moral superiority, these bourgeoisie can’t ever escape their coddled bubbles because they’ve got more money than most people could ever dream of.
These narcissistic yuppies thinking that they’re actually doing something bold is an amusing critique of the privileged upper class fetishization of the “freedom” of being broke—taking down the people who still put living out on their own, outside of the society that they idolized, on a pedestal. But what takes Lost in America to the next level occurs in their first stop on the road. Taking a little detour to Las Vegas to renew their vows, David goes to sleep safe and sound, and Linda slinks downstairs to hit up the casino, where she ends up swiftly blowing their entire nest egg. After perhaps one of the most incredible conversational sequences in the history of cinema, where David tries and fails to convince casino owner Garry Marshall to take the radical step of being the first casino to ever give back money that people lost in order to build a sense of goodwill (that would somehow bring in more business?), we see how easily these people fall apart without their lofty financial support system.
Constant references to Easy Rider are slyly employed to jab at the way in which affluent white culture has often taken from the experience and art of the lower classes, as David regularly mentions the film to explain their venture and none of the working class folks they encounter have seen the movie. The one person who has? A cop who pulls them over, and is so flattered by their mentioning of it when they see him riding a motorcycle (the irony!) that he lets them off with a warning.
2. Real Life (1979)
With things like Albert Brooks’s Famous School for Comedians and his Saturday Night Live shorts, Brooks was already playing around with the mockumentary format, but he took things to new heights with Real Life, his first feature as a director. Works like This Is Spinal Tap or Modern Family, even The Truman Show or edTV, would likely never exist without Brooks’ story of a documentary film producer (Brooks, playing himself) who puts together a radical series that will follow a totally ordinary American family for an entire year. A spoof of the 1973 television program An American Family, Brooks’ film had its finger on the pulse before nearly anyone else, not only predicting that following real people would be vastly more interesting to audiences than following fictional people, but that by doing so show business would become so obsessed with making this “entertaining” that they’d turn it into something completely unreal.
Real Life understood what reality television would become today. It rips open the artificiality of the Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Real Housewives of our modern world, and it did so back in 1979. Brooks recognizes that the second you put “real life” on screen it becomes something else entirely. We instantly see not only how this producer and his team warp the truth of this average family, but how the family themselves are also prone to manipulating their lives beyond any shred of authenticity.
As the father of the family, Charles Grodin has sensational comedic timing, with his sandpaper-dry rhythm expertly utilized by Brooks, whose own performance is on the polar opposite end as his most manic and frenzied of his career. Somehow only ever released on a bare-bones DVD and rarely discussed, Real Life is one of our true undersung comedy masterpieces. If it was more readily available, scenes like Grodin’s veterinarian character being recorded killing a horse because he’s too aware of the cameras—and then essentially being tricked by Brooks into letting it stay in the show—would be regularly cited as some of the greatest comedy ever put to film.
We’ve reached a point in our reality-saturated culture where things have probably teetered so far into meta territory that this approach has lost any sense of magic, but Real Life is meta in the very best of ways. The laughs all still play, from the broad jokes, like Brooks going to the gynecologist of the family’s matriarch (an ace Frances Lee McCain) and recognizing her doctor as the notorious “Baby Broker,” to the simple recurring sight gag of the documentary cameramen’s massive new-age cameras, which are essentially helmets placed over their heads that they have to hold up with both hands at all times. Watching these men hauling around such awkward equipment as they follow the family and try to duck out of view of the other cameramen will never fail to please.
1. Modern Romance (1981)
According to Albert Brooks, after watching Modern Romance, Stanley Kubrick called the filmmaker up and said “How did you do this? This is the jealousy movie I always wanted to make.” That’s high praise coming from the guy who would go on to do Eyes Wide Shut, and it’s fully earned. Billed as a comedy, Brooks deceptively hides in Modern Romance a scathing indictment of toxic masculinity akin to Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur and Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte.
On its surface, this has all the makings of a conventional romantic comedy: An attractive couple, a funny and non-threatening leading man, an ostensibly happy ending. There are plenty of people who could watch this movie and simply enjoy it. The first act is a blast, primarily consisting of Brooks going on a quaalude spiral even more hilarious than the one in The Wolf of Wall Street. It’s when we see Brooks’ Robert Cole interact with Mary Harvard (Kathryn Harrold), starting with their opening breakup scene that’s a clear influence on The Social Network, that the truth comes out. Cole is a toxic manipulator, a possessive Nice Guy who charms his way into a woman’s heart and then constantly convinces her to give him another shot every time he makes an unforgivable mistake in his treatment of her.
We see him endlessly use his genuinely terrifying obsessive behavior as a justification for his idea that he truly loves her. “No one else would drive by your house a hundred times all night long!” he exclaims while trying to talk her back into being with him after he accuses her of cheating on him for the thousandth time. The most frightening thing about this guy is that he believes everything he’s saying. He really does think that these toxic behaviors are proof of his love, and Brooks sells it perfectly. Despite how horrible a person he is, you can fully believe how Mary would fall for it, even though she shows plenty of signs throughout of knowing that this isn’t a healthy partner and she needs to get away from him for good.
As director, Brooks withholds any score from Modern Romance apart from the opening scene. It’s eerie at first, feeling like something is just off because it flies in the face of conventional movie language. Yet this is an early sign of what he’s actually doing here—that this isn’t the sweet rom-com you expect. Modern Romance is extremely funny at times, but more than anything it is brutally uncomfortable to watch how this man capsizes everything around him. And what is comedy, if not truth? There’s no truer portrait of the venomous roller coaster of relationships than Modern Romance.
Currently based in Newark, Delaware, Mitchell Beaupre is the Senior Editor at Letterboxd, and a freelance film journalist for sites including The Film Stage, Paste Magazine, and Little White Lies. With every new movie they watch, they’re adding five more to their never-ending Letterboxd watchlist. You can find them on Twitter at @itismitchell.