Defending Your Life (1991)

Director: Albert Brooks

Cast: Albert Brooks, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn, Lee Grant

Have I Seen it Before: Yep, but it’s been so many years and I watched it a time when I was watching everything I get my hands on that the memory of it has likely faded somewhat.

Did I Like It: There’s not a lot discussion I’ve seen as to just how much this film influenced the sublime experience that became Michael Schur’s The Good Place, but the relationship between ancestor and descendant is certainly there, and I doubt that there is higher praise I can give to either endeavor than that.

Whereas that later work widened the lens to present as perfect a speculative comedic novel in visual form as we’re likely to ever get, this film takes a particular focus on the subject matter and manages to make a Woody Allen-esque* out of the raw material. That would be enough to highly recommend the film, but there’s something so deeply affecting about—of all things—the film’s underlying theology.

Utilitarian good and bad are concepts so difficult to define—to say nothing of enforce—that they threatened to unravel all of existence in The Good Place. In Defending Your Life, intentions behind actions are the governing principle. Was the good or bad done on Earth coming out of fear or love? What’s more, there is no damnation for a botched attempt on the first go around. You’ll move on when you’re ready, or you might not, but that would only come with an insistence to not improve. This may be the only grander design for the nature of the universe that can lay claim to any degree of benevolence and still account for the deeply heinous among us dumb 3-percenters.

I may be a bit of a Brooks-ist at my core.

*Which is the only way I can take in his particular brand of comedy these days without it adding a serious black mark to my own eventual assessment in Judgment City.

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014)

Director: Ken Burns

Cast: Paul Giamatti, Edward Hermann, Meryl Streep, John Lithgow

Have I Seen it Before: We watched the first couple of parts as they aired, but we were moving into this house as it aired, and lost track of the series until quite recently after I got hooked up with PBS app and its comprehensive Ken Burns collection.

Did I Like It: Once again, it becomes somewhat impossible to effectively criticize Burns’ work. Within the framework of his genre, he is the best at what he does. Each film is immaculate, and I have seen more than a few imitators in the historical documentary, and it is imminently possible (in fact, likely the default) to screw it up.

So then this rumination must go to the subject, or in this case, subjects. With Burns’ fair eye, all three Roosevelts of particular note (Teddy, Franklin, and Eleanor) are given full credit for their strengths. With all seven parts running the viewer just shy of fourteen hours, it would have been a significant blunder for some key element of any of the three lives to be assessed. They each so fully engaged with their lives and the worlds in which they found themselves, that many, but not all sins can be forgiven.

They’re failures are given a substantial analysis as well. Teddy (it will truly be difficult to refer to the subjects with due deference, so I assume the reader will forgive undue familiarity) nearly completely whiffed on any degree of courage where race relations were concerned. Franklin was at his heart far too pragmatic to bring a foolproof reworking of the social contract and a perfect peace to a post-war world before succumbing to the ravages of infantile paralysis. That doesn’t even begin to cover the myopic, cowardly internment of Japanese-Americans. Even Eleanor viewed it as a necessity, and it is one of the few times she was confronted with a question of moral right and failed to meet the occasion. Had she been clearer-headed on that, and as steadfast as she had been on everything else, she could have very well turned her husband around on the matter.