Something seems to be missing here, as compared with the earlier Albert Brooks movies, Real Life and Modern Romance. Not laughs, surely; at least not in significant numbers. And the basic idea -- of a young Establishment couple who, with the dim pre-Established memory of Easy Rider as inspiration, renounce the rat race, liquidate their assets, and set off to live out their lives as nomads in a Winnebago -- is as potent as, or more so than, what Brooks had started out with before. But at the same time, there is the gnawing impression that this idea has gotten less far off the drawing board than the others, less far beyond the idea stage. And too many of the people around the two principals -- at the ad agency, at the going-away party, at the Hoover Dam tourist site, at a roadside diner, at a trailer park -- are just blurs. What we certainly have plenty of, however, is Albert Brooks himself, and any reservations to do with how narrowly couple-centered the movie is, how little more than an old Mike Nichols-Elaine May routine, will be largely offset by the fact that one of the couple is Albert Brooks. Here as before, his great contribution to the comic pantheon is the creation of a character who doesn't know his own mind until he opens his mouth to speak, and who can reel himself into any position once he has hooked onto the nearest pop-psychological catch phrase. No comedian has struck a richer motherlode of mush at the heart of modern man. That spotty self-knowledge, that faulty communication with self -- these things, though they virtually kill him as role-model or hero-figure, bring him brilliantly alive as a fictional character. He, more than any of his comic contemporaries, demands that the viewer look beyond the screen. It is a tribute to him as an actor that we need to; and it is a tribute to him as a director that we want to. With Julie Hagerty. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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