Real Life

Plot synopsis:
Ordinary family man Warren Yeager and his wife Jeannette are delighted to have a documentary filmmaker, Albert Brooks, choose them for a new cinematic and "scientific" experiment—he intends to capture every waking moment of their daily life on film. It is a project Brooks confidently announces to a large gathering, even greeting them with a song.
The concept is for the Yeagers and their two children to go about their business at their Phoenix home, work and school as if nothing is different from a typical day, ignoring the fact that men wearing cameras that look like Star Wars helmets are recording every move they make and every word they say.
Brooks promises to be as unobtrusive as possible, taking up a separate residence in the neighborhood and promising not to interfere. Little by little, though, the stress of everyday life is complicated by the presence of the film crew. Brooks also becomes the unwitting object of Mrs. Yeager's attentions.
Yeager, a veterinarian, becomes grief-stricken when he is filmed accidentally causing a horse's death. A grandparent's death similarly upsets Jeannette. Soon the couple stops talking, becoming, as Brooks puts it, "lifeless" in their every day life. The unscrupulous man from Hollywood is likely to go to any lengths to make his film more interesting, even if it means dressing up as a clown to cheer them up or letting the Yeager house catch fire.

Tags: satire

Review:
In _Real Life_, Albert Brooks makes fun of just about anything: the movie industry, the 'nuclear family', intellectuals, horse owners, furniture refinishing, urine testing, technology, Wisconsin ...This film is a gem.
Albert Brooks plays 'himself' to the point where he must have needed therapy after making this film.Vanity projects are usually tedious.
Sure this starts out interesting and goes right along, showing a small Arizona Phoenix as the place where the real family will be followed by a camera and crew, in the home, in their lives and all over the place.
Albert Brooks is an entertaining creative craftsman and his work and acting shows to those who can follow what he is about.I recommend this movie for it's madness and reality type-lore but the fun part is seeing the Arizona from the seventies and how different it is today.
Brooks will always be good at his job I believe, but you have to understand the mind from which it comes.
This film has one funny sight gag - the camera men with their high-tech (for its time) helmet cams prowling the Yeager and Brooks households like voyeuristic aliens.
I'm amazed to read some other comments describing Brooks' first film as "complex." It's consistently dumb and obvious and desperate - the "perfect" family is actually dysfunctional, the black academic is a prig who resents being racially stereotyped, the Hollywood producer only cares about making money not art, a gynecologist is actually a baby trader who was ambushed by "60 Minutes" (sounds funnier than it plays) -- and so on.
I sat there stone-faced for a little over an hour and a half waiting for the humor to kick in, charitably chuckling here or there.Of course with the explosion of reality programming over the last decade, one would think that this film was ahead of its time.
There is absolutely no need for the scientific institute in the film, and Brooks should have remained OFF camera, goading and cajoling the Yeagers into being more "real" from behind the scenes.
But what we get is Brooks moving into the house next door (not funny) and expecting what?
When the documentary finally starts filming, the wife complains of menstrual cramps at the dinner table (not funny) which triggers an unfunny argument with husband Charles Grodin, and we see that reality is messy, unpleasant.
Might have been funny or interesting if the film had built to that moment, showing the Yeagers gradually breaking down under the constant scrutiny of their lives.
But it happens with no build-up, no tension, no funny.Strangely, Brooks seems bored with the Yeager family.
Why would the wife possibly invite Brooks to film her visit to a gynecologist?
And Grodin, a very funny actor, is completely wasted in the bland role of the bland father trying to maintain his bland image.Brooks ill-advisedly makes himself the star, and he just isn't at the top of his game here.
There's no question that Albert Brooks is not for everybody - his particular blend of neuroticism and egomania can be way too much for most people.
Real Life is Brooks' best movie, and deserves to be more widely known than it is.
His portrayal of a controlling producer, who is willing to violate not only broadcast ethics but the standards of decency and good sense as well in order to inject life into his failing "documentary" is frightening, off-putting and truly hilarious all at once.When I first saw this movie, I didn't realize it was based on an actual television experiment.
I bring this up only because when I first saw the film, I felt its only flaw was that it didn't spend enough time showing the family and their disintegration in front of the cameras, choosing instead to focus almost exclusively on Brooks and his manic responses to the dilemma this posed.
However, knowing that the real life experiment would have already been familiar to people, Brooks clearly wanted to use this movie to examine not the family but the bankrupt commercial mindset which would put such a  project into play in the first place.
We have four of those." IMHO this is the best movie Brooks ever made.
He plays an egocentric, inept film director who turns a simple movie into a botched science experiment.
Real Life Is The Most Underrated movie ever!.
I think what most filmmakers say when they watch a great film is "I wish I made that movie".
Albert Brooks, proves that he is one of the funniest comedians ever, and in my opinion one of the best actors on the screen.
Any Albert Brooks fan who has not seen his first glorious feature is truly missing out.
As anyone can attest, Brooks has the rare gift of turning ordinary human moments into riotously funny scenes, and this film is full of such moments, plus much more subversive material, like the way Grodin's character repeatedly comes perilously close to committing a felony against his family.Perhaps the greatest joke of all is that while the character "Albert Brooks" continuously states how he is documenting real life, we all know that this is really a star vehicle for him.
This film, more that anything, is a satirical take on how Hollywood subverts what is really "real life," all this coming from a director with as great a grasp on how humans relate to one another than anyone..
Albert Brooks may be the funniest man alive!.
You can't even begin to describe Albert Brooks' humor.
'Real life' is the perfect send-up of the worst scenario possible for a film maker shooting a documentary, i.e., what happens when your subject matter loses interest in the project before completion?
Albert Brooks, as the seemingly besieged director of this 'loaf of reality' year long vigil with a typical American family, walks a fine line between egomania and neuroticism and scores with broad belly laughs both ways.
Charles Grodin as the head of the suburban clan from which this film within a film emanates exudes his special brand of bland exuberance at the beginning of this captive camera stakeout inside his home(and everywhere else he may go) provided his life is depicted as letter perfect from day to day.
For Brooks regards this film as 'paramount'(oops) over the desires of his cast of characters.
Brooks facile mind works methodically from beginning to end.
Brooks is a comic delight as a man who cannot take criticism regarding his methods and his interaction with  project staff  are decidedly one-sided, but in the capable hands of this farceur, his myopic viewpoint is always good for guffaws galore.
Real life should be this funny..
In his directorial debut, Albert Brooks combines the broad but edgy satire developed in his short films on `Saturday Night Live' with the ruthless self-flagellation that would become his trademark and while it falls short of the genius that would explode in `Modern Romance' and `Lost In America', it's chock full of purpose.
Brooks has a lot on his plate and wants to make sure he gets it all out in the open: his targets include documentary filmmaking, reality television (his prescience about today's programming is surprising), Hollywood and, not least of all, the role of the comedian as social critic in society.
As a narcissistic comedian/filmmaker intruding into the lives of a hapless Phoenix nuclear family (the parents are Charles Grodin and Frances Lee McCain), Brooks immediately establishes a sophisticated filmic style that includes a mastery of long, uncomfortable takes and a shrewd sense of camera placement that keeps you tuned into the conceit of having lives recorded for fun and profit; that the conceit turns outrageously psychotic at the end only adds to the immaculate design.
Midway through this film we are in the operating room of a veterinarian (Charles Grodin) watching his surgery on a sick horse.
Several psychologists have gathered around a table and are analyzing a piece of film shot by Brooks showing the hands of family member Charles Grodin picking up a coffee cup.
The psychologists make a useful and funny point or two about the hands and coffee cup, but after five minutes we are are thinking, "How long will this sequence last?" The answer: something north of 10 minutes.
Another 10 to 15 minutes of the film is occupied by the mom (Frances Lee McCain, whose performance here is very good) falling in love with the director (Brooks) and then falling out of love.
(She's the best thing in the film, and boom, she's gone.)This film, at its core (and here's the primary "larger" theme) is a satire on the evil ways of Hollywood —- its self-absorption, its idiocy, its unchained narcissism as embodied in Brooks.
This tricky territory has been handled well once or twice in film history -— "Sunset Boulevard" comes to mind —- but really, the ticket-buying audience doesn't connect to, and isn't interested in, the inside of Hollywood (in fact, basically hates the inside of Hollywood) unless an Everyman of the caliber of William Holden is present as their representative.
(Memo to Albert Brooks: you're not William Holden, and, by the way, your co-writer, the oh-so-arch Harry Shearer, is no I.A.L. Diamond, who was an actual human being.)Brooks has chances, in a couple of places, to make this thing work.
He could smash through the fences and blow Hollywood frickin' UP, and if he could do that early in the film, he could set a pace that could make the whole thing sing.
We end up agreeing with his self-assessment: "I'm a stupid, stupid jerk." The camera guy who looks at his watch toward the end is on the mark.This is a worthless, audience-insulting, thick-headed movie.
That said, I'm sure one or two people in Hollywood watched it, said, "The man's a genius!" and invested millions in his (and Harry Shearer's) filmmaking future.
Comedian Brooks tries hard, probably too hard, while the script makes a hash of Hollywood satire.
Playing a moviemaker in the film, actor Brooks' promising idea is to document a year in the life of a typical American family.
Worse, he's got a battery of distracting psychologists analyzing the minutiae (coffee cups) of the family's daily life.
All in all, the movie's really a mess, despite occasionally funny moments.
Still, the latter raise a thought-provoking question- that is, just how broad should a real life account be.
...this is one of the funniest American movies of the late 20th century, and like 'Tap' it also mines the rich vein of documentary-film arrogance.
Albert Brooks tries so hard,....
Albert Brooks tries so hard in this fake documentary about American family life that you find yourself willing to wade through the movie's many slow moments and gags that just don't succeed.
Plus, the movie can be quite funny from time to time.
But, in general, I look at this like a fake documentary that was a noble experiment that ultimately failed--but is still worth seeing.
After all, if it hadn't been for films like this, maybe they never would have made films like BEST IN SHOW as well as AND GOD SPOKE.Although the purpose of this documentary is to show American family life in an unobtrusive manner, ultimately, the family becomes like a lot of modern "reality TV" families and the action becomes more and more suggested by the producer, Brooks.
And, ultimately, the filming takes on a dramatic impact on the family.Funny, insightful but far from perfect..
Good Albert PHOENIX Brooks movie'.
This movie was good and there was a lot of DARK humor, such as the horse scene, where another 2.5 percent of halophane was injected into that HORSE.The martian photographers were interesting.
It's a mockumentary of sorts.Albert Brooks is the best..
Albert Brooks, earlier in his career, may not have been the most appealing person in show business, but his screen persona was then certainly one of the funniest: insecure, obsessive, vain, and obnoxious enough to make his low-key, self-deprecating satires a definite acquired taste.
In this mock cinema verité parody of a then topical PBS reality series he attempts to document on camera one year in the life of the second-most typical family in America (the runner-up was preferred in order to avoid a winter in Green Bay, Wisconsin).
Charles Grodin's typically deadpan performance sets the proper comic mood, and the scenario includes plenty of cinema in-jokes sure to raise a chuckle from any film student (it might have been titled 'Reel Life').
This is, of course, a very funny film (it's Albert Brooks, after all).
Albert Brooks and his film crew follow the hapless family in "Real Life", dressed in bizarre helmet-cams.
What she couldn't grasp -- but Albert Brooks does -- was that while the cameras weren't foremost in their minds all the time, you can't help but be influenced by the peripheral knowledge that a big Betacam camera and mike boom are just a few feet from your so-called "reality"..
If you don't become a Brooks fan after seeing this film, you'll never be one..
In his most thorough feat of self-deprecation, Albert Brooks plays himself as a smarmy upstart Hollywood director charged with filming a real-life portrait of an "ordinary" Phoenix family to be financed by the Boulder Institute for Behavioral Science.
Taking as its satirical subject the PBS series "An American Family", Real Life's opening text scroll includes an excerpt from a media critic that reads (paraphrasing), "This is a whole new method of anthropological researchas interpreted by the camera." It's the last part, "interpreted by the camera," that clearly interests Brooks.
In detailing the crumbling of the family and the director's process of selecting what to shoot and how (it isn't long before he's staging scenes), Brooks shows how the mere presence of the camera shapes a new reality for spectator and subject.
Their first dinner under camera (the technicians wear ridiculous astronaut-like helmet devices over the top halves of their bodies) has Charles Grodin trying to present his perfect family, but his stressed-out wife gives a hilariously blunt assessment of her feelings.
(Meanwhile, Brooks wonders whether his leading man is coming across as unsympathetic.) The institute's naïve statisticians don't see the folly of their pursuit until Brooks makes the film his blatant vanity project; the comic highpoint is a montage of happy, slow-motion family moments that Brooks narrates ("I'll show the French what a montage really is!").
In this project, all are delusional, from the quixotic scientists who fatuously hired Hollywood talent for a film about reality to the unseen producer who makes money the inappropriate subject of every conversation.
And film-making, like all profit-driven endeavors, is subject to self-interest, rendering futile the entire notion of the camera as objective recorder.
REAL funny.
Albert Brooks wrote and directed this goof on the PBS landmark "An American Family" and it's hysterical.
Trying to record the day to day banalities of an average American family, film-maker Brooks and company are as intrusive as possible while trying to be invisible --- the cameraman wears large orb-like headgear.As the "everyman," Brooks wisely casts Charles Grodin, then at the height of his career and perfect playing the kind of inept father/husband just itching to be caught doing the most absurd things.
Brooks doesn't just film the family, he invades their lives and captures a lot of uncomfortable moments like a gynecological exam!
REAL LIFE is a masterpiece of comic discomfort..
Real Life.
This is the directorial debut of comedian Albert Brooks, best known for voicing Marlin in Finding Nemo and Finding Dory, it was rated average by most critics, but it sounded like a really interesting concept, and it was featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. Basically Albert Brooks (whose real name is Albert Einstein!) plays a darker version of himself, he has become a documentary filmmaker, his new cinematic and scientific experiment is a film that will capture every waking moment in the everyday life of an American family.
Many families are auditioned, they are whittled down to two, until Brooks and his other producers settle on the ordinary Yeager family from Phoenix, Arizona: husband/father Warren Yeager (Charles Grodin), wife/mother Jeanette (Gremlins' Frances Lee McCain), and their children, Lisa (Lisa Urette) and Eric (Robert Stirrat).
The concept is for the family to go about their business, at home, at work and at school as if nothing is different, ignoring the fact that men wearing cameras that look like Star Wars helmets are recording every move they make and every word they say.
Brooks promises to be as unobtrusive as possible, taking a separate residence in the neighbourhood and not interfering, "for the good of the show".
But the presence of the crew causes stress and complications for the family, and Brooks has unwittingly becoming the object of Mrs. Yeager's affections.
There is a point when Mrs. Yeager is going for a medical examination, but she seems to have no reservations about allowing the film crew to capture it, this is course causes a lot of controversy.
Brooks from Hollywood is unscrupulous and will do almost anything to make a more interesting film, including dressing as a clown to cheer them up.
But the family also do not wish to be part of it any longer, despite pleas from Brooks, they will not change their minds to abandon the project.
Albert Brooks' REAL LIFE maintains an eerie prescience, but the man simply took a PBS experiment from the '70s and smashed it into Hollywood artifice to profound comedic effect.
His character's film experiment (you guessed it, to document real life as movie) seems novel, but the family's miserable and it only goes downhill from there.
It's a well-chosen cast, full of funny personalities - Grodin is a highlight here and can't stop making contact with the camera - and then there's Brooks' used car salesman filmmaker, virtually devolving matters into absurdity by his own hand.