Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 5, 1991 TAG: 9104050165
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MAL VINCENT LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
They are not discouraged by the fact that he only makes a movie about every five years. At the moment, they are celebrating that there is, at long last, a new Albert Brooks movie on the market - "Defending Your Life," which opens today at Tanglewood Mall in Roanoke. It concerns no less than the comedic side of what happens after death, and it co-stars Meryl Streep.
Bounding into the room in tennis shoes and khaki trousers, Brooks has the clear, cool look of impetuous youth rather than that of a "deep" moviemaker. At 43, he has an open face and an All-American crew cut. He's the poor man's Woody Allen - taking a gentle look at death that would have been bathed in angst if Woody had done it.
The birth pangs of "Defending Your Life" started a long time ago, he says: "It began when I was 12 years old and my father died. That's when I got a head start on wondering where people go.
"So few movies are made about death, and yet it's something we are all going to experience. I make notes to myself about it all the time. Now, the notes are spread all over my house. Under the cushions. Everywhere. And I can't read most of them. But I got a script. I got one."
In the film, Brooks plays Daniel Miller, a yuppie who dies after hitting a bus in his new sports car. He "wakes up" in Judgment City, which looks a lot like Disneyland. He learns that he will be judged at a trial, complete with prosecutor, defender and film clips from his life.
The issue is how well he was able to overcome fear while he was alive. Unfortunately, flashbacks show him backing down from a bully as a youngster, failing to ask for the salary he wanted when hired for a job and not taking the investment risk that would have made him rich.
In 1979, he made "Real Life," the story of a team of filmmakers who move in with an average American family and try to turn their lives into a movie. In 1983, he co-wrote and directed "Modern Romance," about two people who are madly in love but completely incompatible.
He has also appeared as an actor in films he didn't direct. He made his movie debut in Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver," playing a presidential campaign worker. He played Goldie Hawn's husband, who dies on their wedding night, in "Private Benjamin"; the driver who picks up hitchhiker Dan Aykroyd in "Twilight Zone . . . The Movie"; and Dudley Moore's manager in "Unfaithfully Yours."
He was nominated for the Oscar for playing the sweating newscaster in "Broadcast News."
How come he doesn't appear in more films? "I don't want to play a cop, and that's all there is to play," Brooks replies. "Every movie is about a cop."
In "Defending Your Life," one of the most appealing features of the afterlife is that you can eat everything and never put on weight. That comes straight out of Brooks' fantasies.
"I've had this dream that I'm in the hospital, dying," he says. "And the doctor comes along and he tells me that the only thing that will save me is to eat anything and everything I want. So I eat chocolate sundaes, steaks - everything."
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