Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

The stand-up comedian & filmmaking legend gets his own living retrospective in this warm and revealing documentary from friend/director Rob Reiner on HBO/Max.

The hardest I’ve ever laughed at a movie was during Albert Brooks’ “Defending Your Life.” Though its reception by critics and audiences was rather modest, it’s a film that has continued to grow and grow in many people’s estimation and I daresay now, more than 30 years on, it’s considered a modern classic.

The story was about a middle-aged schlub who dies and travels to the afterlife, which in this reckoning is not all poofy clouds and harps but a sort of waystation-slash-reckoning. The newly dead person is forced to review their life in a kind of trial, complete with prosecutors, defenders and judges, and if they are deemed to have lived a sufficiently enlightened life they are allowed to move on to a higher place of existence.

Otherwise, they get reincarnated back on Earth to try again.

My big laugh moment came when Brooks was sitting down to dinner with Meryl Streep, playing another recently deceased, and the waiter casually asks how many days of defending their life they have. (It had been established the shorter the time, the more likely they are to pass.) When Brooks says “nine,” the waiter stops and gives this little three-note murmur of concern.

It’s just a little throwaway joke, but I swear I roared uncontrollably for the next 10 minutes. Fortunately it was an HBO, so I was able to go back and rewatch what I’d missed.

Brooks, who was one of the first stand-up comedians to segue into making movies, not just as an actor but writer/director, is now the subject of a documentary that serves as a sort of living retrospective — the kind of thing you normally make after a person has died. Though Brooks, at 76, seems mostly retired, he hopefully will grace us with his presence for many more years.

Directed by his lifelong friend Rob Reiner, “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life” — also on HBO/Max — is a warm, revealing look at the life and work of the man. They sit and chat in an empty restaurant in a “My Dinner with Andre” type setting, interspersed with tons of archival footage from his many television appearances, recordings and movies.

I learned a lot about Brooks I didn’t know before. And not just the easy stuff, like the fact was born with the given name of Albert Einstein, which he (obviously) changed for showbiz.

Brooks has enjoyed many relationships throughout showbiz that didn’t necessarily translate to collaboration. For example, he hung out extensively with Steven Spielberg in the early 1970s, usually with the then-rookie filmmaker’s camera rolling. We get to see some of this stuff for the very first time, man-on-the-street comedic encounters with strangers that would later influence Brooks’ short films for “Saturday Night Live.”

Speaking of, Lorne Michaels and company originally envisioned “SNL” as “The Albert Brooks Show,” but he thought such a variety ensemble should have a rotating host each week — thus establishing the form of arguably the most enduring comedy platform of all time.

I also didn’t know Brooks went to high school with Reiner, along with many other notables including Richard Dreyfuss. A ton of other showbiz luminaries provide testimonials about their personal and/or professional relationship with him, including Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, Wanda Sykes, Conan O’Brien, James L. Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Ben Stiller, David Letterman, Larry David, Jonah Hill, Brian Williams, Tiffany Haddish, Nikki Glaser and Judd Apatow.

Those younger than Brooks absolutely revere him — his contemporaries, too. Many first encountered him on television, including more than 30 appearances on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,” where Brooks would commit the now-unthinkable dare of performing a new bit for the very first time on live network television.

This has been a key feature of Brooks’ work: that feeling of spontaneity and authenticity, breaking out of the set-up/punchline format of stand-up to do stuff more experimental and conversational. He’s referred to as “the first alternative comic” and even doing “punk rock with comedy.”

We get to traipse through Brooks’ entire filmography, from the early successes of “Real Life” and “Modern Romance” (which I feel ashamed to still have never seen) and “Lost in America,” to more recent and less successful works like “The Muse” and “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World” — which barely got released due to squabbles with the studio during the depths of the Iraq invasion.

I was also glad the documentary touched on his for-hire roles in movies he didn’t direct, revealing what an absolute bang-up actor he is, from “Taxi Driver,” his terrific villainous turn in “Drive” and his signature neurotic/empathetic character in “Broadcast News,” for which he received an Oscar nomination and which is one of my all-time favorite films.

Another big reveal from the movie: both of Brooks’ parents had also been performers. His father, Harry Einstein, was a notable comedian and a member of the New York Friars Club known professionally as “Parkyakarkus.”

Harry’s death was even famous: he gave a bring-the-house-down performance from a wheelchair at the Friars Club dinner where Lucille Ball was inducted, returned to his seat and promptly died on the spot.

He was in ill health Albert’s entire life, and the son talks movingly about growing up knowing his father always had one foot on death’s doorstep. This no doubt influenced his signature neuroticism and sense of detachment.

Brooks managed to make a film about his relationship with each of his parents. “Mother,” starring Debbie Reynolds in a semi-autobiographical version of his real mom, allowed him to hash out her own unfulfilled entertainment ambitions, having been a successful singer before giving it up to have children, and how it colored their own contentious give-and-take.

And “Defending Your Life” is clearly his ode to his dad, or at least the fundamental sense of anxiety and dread the resulted from his long goodbye. The huge weight hanging around Brooks’ head in that film is his character’s inability to overcome his sense of fear, which ended up squeezing his life into a narrow path.

“I didn’t like movies about heaven. I don’t like the clouds, I don’t like the harps. And this movie has no religion,” Brooks says of his film. “So what this movie is really about is fear, which I’ve dealt with my whole life.”

From the perspective of an admirer, it may seem hard to believe that fear was the guiding principle of Brooks’ life. His biggest challenge, perhaps, but one he clearly overcame to carve out one of the most original and eclectic careers — one well revered in “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life.”