“When you use more than five percent of your brain, you don’t want to be on earth; believe me.”
Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to cinapse.twocents@gmail.com.
The Pick: Defending Your Life
When Defending Your Life first came to video in late 1991, I was already a video store enthusiast and was well aware of its presence, even though I had firmly decided that it wasn’t for me. Around 20 years later, I finally watched it and simply couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to embrace the whimsical high-concept comedy and all of its joys. I had always rather thought of Defending Your Life as the “bomb” in the Albert Brooks canon since the film never came close to the acclaim celebrated by earlier efforts, Modern Romance and Lost in America. Still, this incredibly winning tale of what comes next after death never ceases to surprise with its incredibly Brooks-ian edge and its utterly tender nature.
Written and directed by Brooks, Defending Your Life saw him starring as Daniel Miller, a low-level executive who, upon buying a new car for his birthday, immediately dies in an auto accident. Soon, Daniel finds himself transported to a place in the afterlife known as “Judgment City,”; a resort-like town where those who have died must face a trial of sorts where various moments in a person’s life are examined to determine whether they are allowed to move onto heaven or must return to earth to “try again.” While there, he meets and falls in love with Julia (Meryl Streep), a woman who lived her life in the opposite way Daniel did, leading him to suspect that their romance may be short-lived as they don’t seem to be headed towards the same place.
Our Guest:
Eoin Daly
Defending Your Life is an interesting title and one that sticks out in Meryl Streep’s career at this stage as she plays second fiddle to Albert Brooks, the film’s director/writer. In a time when Streep was an in-demand leading lady star, a supporting part feels like a career outlier. Yet given the importance of her role and impact, it makes total sense why she’d want to star in it.
From the beginning, Streep radiates luminosity so strongly that you become obsessed with Julia to the point that each light giggle she utters and smile she gives adds to such a compelling performance.
Streep has wonderful chemistry opposite Brooks’ usual deadpan delivery. The pair’s getting-to-know-each-other scenes see her so engrossed in her co-star, selling the oddness of their pairing. Streep yet again is playing a contemporary woman who, while we are clued into mostly through her describing her living life, is a person like Brooks Daniel, whom we become so attracted to.
Streep’s Julia has never really been a performance I have thought about in the grand scheme of her whole career, yet watching this film again, I will be changing this as I was so enthralled by this stunning performance.
Defending Your Life is at its most satisfying as a viewing experience when Streep appears on screen. I do think most of the credit must go to Meryl whose happiness and purity just oozes out of her, even if Julia is simply reminiscing on the excitement of seeing her past lives or taking pleasure in eating countless amounts of calorie-free food. Streep is so magnetic as Julia, showcasing yet another ability that filmmakers hadn’t necessarily asked her to play previously.
The Team:
Eddie Strait
Going into Defending Your Life, I knew the bare basics of the plot but not any major details, which I’m glad for. The thing that immediately stands out about the movie is that it finds one of the more direct, incisive ways to evaluate someone’s life. A less curious and probing mind might have settled on evaluating its characters in the simple good/bad binary that’s all too easy to default to. Instead, Albert Brooks hones in on the thing we all grapple with, which is fear. Did we let fear of failure, of rejection, of embarrassment, of disappointment prevent us from living the lives we want for ourselves?
As Daniel (Brooks) quips his way through the afterlife, his character and the movie become a mirror for the audience. It kind of snuck up on me, but near the end of the movie, I began to dread revisiting the various moments of Daniel’s life where he let fear dictate his decisions. Brooks was forcing me to look inward as much as he does with Daniel, and it creates a snowball effect with each creaking rotation of the chair Daniel sits in. Juxtaposed against the much happier and fulfilled Julia (Meryl Streep), Daniel’s fear becomes both more maddening and relatable.
Defending Your Life is a great showcase for Brooks as a writer. The other films of his I’ve seen trend toward satire and have an edge that makes his insights sting. Both of those elements are largely gone from Defending Your Life, and the result is a deeply compassionate and insightful ode to living your life as best you can. I loved this one.
Ed Travis
While I enjoyed Lost in America quite a bit as my first toe dipped into the filmography of Albert Brooks as a writer/director, I flat out LOVED Defending Your Life. Despite having heard both of these titles bandied about as among his best work, I honestly knew virtually nothing about them before pressing play. I was shocked to find this richly realized afterlife film in Defending Your Life; something totally unexpected and delightfully surprising.
I’ve seen countless depictions of the afterlife in the cinema and the church (not to mention album covers), but I can honestly say I’ve never quite seen anything like Defending Your Life. Which, let’s be honest, is incredible for a film that was released in 1991 after hundreds of depictions had already been attempted, and before the hundreds more that have been released since. A largely religion-free experience, Brooks’ character Daniel Miller quickly gets hit by a bus and becomes our avatar to navigate Judgment City. I love every idea and concept explored here, and also became emotionally swept up in the characters and story… and I laughed a bunch along the way too, for good measure.
Daniel and everyone else in Judgment City will undergo a trial of sorts. Going back to earth to be reincarnated and “try again” is the undesirable outcome of the trial. Ideally, you’ll “move forward” to a different plane of existence where you’ll use a greater percentage of your brain and you’ll be more enlightened. Throughout the trial, we’ll see scenes from Daniel’s life as his defender (Rip Torn) tries to make the case that Daniel is no longer ruled by fear, and the prosecutor (Lee Grant) tries to prove that he’s still driven by fear. It’s complex in its morality and remains ever interesting by never adhering to pat theological concepts. Throughout the film, Daniel meets and falls in love with Julia (Meryl Streep), and their courtship is endlessly charming as they both navigate the afterlife with earnestness not often found in “human” characters. Julia was the superior human being in the last life, but both are open to growth, eyes opened by death and love, with almost no cynicism to be found.
In the end, love drives out fear (maybe it’s not so irreligious after all), and the swelling music escorts our lovers along to the next plane, leaving us just as fascinated by what comes next as we were by what has just been.
Frank Calvillo
Known as the West Coast Woody Allen, Brooks has made a career out of creating characters who are never able to fully reconcile themselves with the intricacies of daily life, while at the same time, employing a comedy backhand with one-liners that come second to none. All of the above is evident in Defending Your Life’s Daniel, no matter what he is going through. “How did you die,” an unfunny comic asks him at a comedy club show in Judgment City. “On stage like you,” is his instant reply. In many ways, Defending Your Life is the quintessential Brooks creation since it allows him to engage in more self-deprecating humor than normal, given Daniel’s current situation. With everyone on trial assigned to hotels according to how brave and bold they were when they were alive, Daniel is dismayed to discover that Julia is staying in a Plaza-like hotel while he is somewhere quite opposite. “Where are you staying,” she asks him. “Obviously, at the place for people who weren’t very generous and didn’t adopt anybody,” he replies. “I’m at the Continental. Come over one day; we’ll paint it.”
Amid the plentiful humor in the movie, Defending Your Life does indeed make a solid effort to examine the concept of fear in a person’s everyday existence. Through Daniel, we see a man who has been governed by fear, doubt, and crippling insecurity for so much of his life, he’s stopped trying to conquer it and has instead trained himself to live with it. Because of this, Daniel sees his worst nightmare come true when he finds out that he’s “on trial for being afraid.” The judging Brooks gives Daniel in the script isn’t necessarily harsh, but it is fair. Moments from the past including accepting the first salary offer at a new job, covering for a classmate before later throwing him under the bus and especially not being able to fully acknowledge his feelings for Julia (who is just as smitten with him as he with her) are all instances faced by each of us in one form or another which have likewise given us pause. Because of this, Defending Your Life works and resonates with the audience due to how it eventually stops asking Daniel to justify his past and instead tries to figure out why he led the life he lived.
ALBERT BROOKS 101
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