Albert Brooks, his first time as a director, casts himself as a first-time director, a brash Hollywood enfant terrible who immodestly sees himself as taking the next epoch-making step in cinematic art, starting from where the public-television documentary An American Family left off, and ascending to a higher plateau of Reality than has yet been reached on screen. There is a wonderfully humbling and just finish to this undertaking when the overweening central character comes to the realization that where he had set out in search of Reality, what he has ended up with instead, when his grand experiment goes sour and the local media get wind of the odor, is nothing more than The News. Brooks's use of An American Family as a springboard would seem to owe something, as few American humorists do not, to S.J. Perelman. The debt in this case has to do with Brooks's procedure of starting from a premise of established cultural data (for Perelman, newspaper clippings, advertisements, snippets from magazine articles often set the gears in motion) and taking off on a flight of fancy around that premise in an ever widening and wavering orbit, but nonetheless peppering the home base with air-to-ground missiles of remarkable accuracy from wherever they are let fly. With Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain. (1979) — Duncan Shepherd
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