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.