Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks’s fourth film, is, in many ways, the logical progression of his third, Lost in America. That movie posited the yuppie as the amoral void of America’s soul, so bereft of genuine connection to his immediate surroundings that the larger backdrop of the nation could never hope to be understood. This 1991 film goes one further and suggests that capital-minded paper-pushers would equally be the dull bane of the afterlife, not damned to hellfire but doomed to irritate the more generous and self-aware of the dead until they can be shuffled back to Earth for a mortal mulligan.
Brooks establishes his protagonist, Daniel, within minutes: He emanates a sense of bourgeois anhedonia, joking about his dead-end corporate life to fellow executives who mirthlessly celebrate his birthday as if it were just a point in a meeting agenda. He buys a new BMW convertible and blasts dreary new-age pop into Los Angeles’s hot air, cut short when he crashes his new car and dies. The rest of the film puts Daniel in purgatory as he awaits judgment for his life, but one gets a complete sense of the empty, shallow existence he had well before he has to go to trial for it.
Brooks pivots from the social orientation of his previous films, which tackled such subjects as the limits of the American dream and the marketability of “reality” in a world where everything seems to be documented on television. Yet in many respects, Defending Your Life is his most grandly scaled film. Though it ultimately centers on the moral status of nebbish anxiety and hollow social climbing, the film projects these personal reckonings against a backdrop that could almost be called Tati-esque. Judgment City, the gigantic waiting area where Daniel resides during his trial, houses only the dead of the western United States, one of many such areas designed with geographic and cultural specificity to make the transition into death as comfortable as possible for everyone on Earth.
Yet if the city is reflective of a culture, it primarily reflects the values that are being inveighed against Daniel as he is attacked for always accepting second-best in life. The entire city resembles a new-age spa crossed with a Disneyland recreation of an office park. What foliage there is exists only to pleasantly line food-court patios, and buildings come in every color, so long as it’s off-white. The terminal where Daniel arrives as a newly dead man and departs to his living quarters is right out of Playtime, a looming block of steel and glass with no distinguishing features, from which theme-park trams issue forth with cheery guides pointing out all the pleasures of the city.
Where Jacques Tati used the epic scale of his own modern playground to intentionally dwarf his characters, however, Brooks manages to pull focus back onto the personal. Just as the city around Daniel is indicative of his bourgeois L.A. life, his trial appears to be waged not on objective measurements of morality but according to the values of whatever society to which the dead belonged. As such, he must constantly answer for moments in his life where he failed to act in ways that would have increased his standing: He flubs a raise negotiation, freezes during a speech that would have elevated him, and laughs off a chance to be one of Casio’s first investors and thus a millionaire many times over. Even Daniel calls out these supposed instances of character failure to be all about money while his prosecutor (Lee Grant) insists they are merely showcases of his debilitating fear. But in this context, is there a difference between monetary wealth and fearlessness?
This notion—that consumerism so alters our perception of life that the afterlife can be altered as well—is as shrewd as any of Brooks’s other social observations, but it is kept resolutely character-based by his dry sense of humor. Brooks can’t help but insert fleeting potshots at small things that irk him, like the state of comedy clubs of the late-’80s and early-’90s boom in a scene of a hack comic trading in recycled insults and dead-end punchlines. “How’d ya die, sir?” the fool asks Daniel. “On a stage, like you,” he replies, getting the first laughs from the assembled crowd. In clips of Daniel’s childhood shown at the trial, whatever judgments are made regarding his reluctance to stand up to bullies is tacitly complicated by the fact that the young Daniel is the only person in a class of slick-haired, fair-skinned WASPs with suspiciously curly hair, singling him out even when he’s not being harassed. The word “Jewish” is never used, but as the prosecutor grills him over the mere fact of Daniel’s childhood cowardice, she seems to have no concept of the other factors that already isolated him.
Seen in this light, Defending Your Life isn’t the radical break from Brooks’s earlier satires that it initially seems. What is a change, however, is the genuine romance that he writes for Daniel and Julia (Meryl Streep), another Judgment City denizen who is Daniel’s opposite in every way. Where Daniel is anxious, self-denying and, well, Jewish, Julia is a tall blonde overflowing with confidence, whose past lives are filled with valor and whose most recent time on Earth is so unimpeachable that even the highly developed beings who judge the dead gawk at her with admiration. Streep is utterly winsome in the role, though even she makes time for a barbed silent comment in how happily she gorges on food in a place where nothing has caloric consequences, saying much about the pressures on women and especially actresses to stay fit, and saying it with her mouth full.
But the earnest love that blossoms between the two is such a surprise coming from the pen of the guy who wrote and directed Modern Romance, and Streep always manages to make Julia’s too-perfect nature more complex than it seems. The film spends so much time in Daniel’s headspace that Julia’s balance of selfishness and selflessness, of never letting fear hold her back while still living for other people as much as herself, at first seems alien when it should be what everyone aspires to. It’s no wonder the angels or lawyers or whatever the bureaucracy of Judgment City is called admire her; she reminds them of virtues that even they hardly process when dealing with the dead of postwar and post-Reagan America. The film’s “love conquers all” ending may be clichéd, but in being more like Julia, Daniel not only bests the afterlife, but also belatedly throws off the worst aspects of this life as well.
One thought on ““Defending Your Life” At 25”
this film and Mother rank pretty close to the top of my all-time favorites list. This one manages to be really understated and subtle at times, despite the sort-of-high-concept premise.