Usually, a red flag goes up when a director makes a documentary about his best friend. It’s almost a sure bet the film will be a puff piece full of softball questions that won’t really cut to the heart of the subject. I mean, if a director was making a documentary on a controversial subject that just so happened to be his best friend, it would be one-sided and boring. Then again, when the subject is Albert Brooks and the filmmaker is Rob Reiner, all that kinda goes out the window.
So, basically what we have here is two friends eating dinner and talking shop, while Brooks takes Reiner on a trip down memory lane. He talks about his early life, his groundbreaking stand-up career, and his equally entertaining work in the movies. Because it’s just two friends talking, the conversation is casual, not interrogational. Like most documentaries, Reiner peppers the film with snippets and clips to illustrate points and highlight Brooks’ career milestones, while occasionally cutting to talking head interviews from fans and contemporaries.
We see Brooks early in his career via his cutting-edge comedy appearances on TV variety shows to his sets on Johnny Carson to the short films he made for Saturday Night Live. The big revelation here is that Brooks was initially tapped to be the permanent host of the show, and he was the one who suggested they should have a different host week to week. (Another cool tidbit is the fact that he and Steven Spielberg, who is among the interviewees, used to cruise Hollywood Boulevard with a home movie camera and do impromptu man on the street interviews for shits and giggles.) By the time you get to the clips from his films, you’ll be making a mental checklist of Brooks-related bits to YouTube after you’re done with the movie.
One of the most innovative comedic minds of the 20th century, it’s almost unfathomable that Brooks hasn’t had a documentary made about him until now. It also happens to be one of Reiner’s best films in years and shows that even though he made the immortal This is Spinal Tap all those years ago, he maybe should’ve been making real documentaries all this time.
Ultimately, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life acts as a fun, if lightweight, career retrospective. While it may stop short of being the definitive film on the subject, it’s massively entertaining to see two comedy greats picking each other’s brains for ninety minutes. It’s certainly in the running for one of the best docs of the year.
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