LOST IN AMERICA (71)

Directed by: Albert Brooks (1985)

Starring: Albert Brooks, Julie Hagerty, Garry Marshall

The Pitch: A yuppie couple decide to quit their lucrative lifestyle for a life on the road.

Theo Sez: In many ways a companion-piece to (roughly contemporary) movies like THE BIG CHILL, all about the sacrifice of countercultural 60s ideals on the altar of capitalism - a hot topic back when the student radicals of the 60s were pushing forty, not so pressing nowadays when they're comfortably ensconced in middle age. That may account for what - to our more resigned late-90s viewpoint - seems a curiously sour tone, almost savage in its mockery of the hapless protagonists (sample joke : our hero, thrilled to be out "on the road" EASY RIDER-style, gives an enthusiastic thumbs-up to a passing biker - who promptly responds by giving him the finger) ; or it may just be that this is a comedy from the time when Brooks was a mercilessly sharp satirist as well as a loveable neurotic. Certainly the feelgood factor is amazingly low - characters are mean to each other, do terrible things, watch helplessly as their dreams collapse ; it may be funny, but emotionally it's raw as an open wound (how many well-known actresses today would dare play a scene as unsympathetic as that where Hagerty allows husband Brooks to get beaten up, knowing that a word from her would've saved him?). Above all there's the audacious ending, bringing the couple's odyssey to such a sudden and inglorious end that you almost assume it's unintentional, that Brooks ran out of money or something - which may even, for all I know, be the case ; it's the perfect capper to a singularly bleak comedy.