Real Life - 1979 - 4 Stars

Not long after the Reality TV craze began, a lot of middlebrow folks wondered what exactly was 'real' about Reality TV. Sure, the people on these shows were usually not actors, and there was no 'story', but the situations depicted were so removed from actual living. Further adding to that is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle of Art (which I may have stolen from somewhere), which is that observing people, when they know they're being observed, changes them.

Albert Brooks's Real Life anticipates all of this, but its wit does not even lie in prediction. It is a genuinely funny film. Brooks plays a Hollywood director producing a movie that captures the life of a normal American family for a year. Adding an extra layer of irony to the whole thing is the fact that it is a movie about a movie about 'reality' which is being depicted by actors and has a script; as a meta-film, it doesn't really work (or goes over well-trodden ground), but as a meta-meta-film, it's quite brilliant and hilarious at points.


There's a great shot in the film that kind of captures this - Brooks is talking with the wife of the family, who would like some privacy to have a discussion with him about the 'film'. Of course he will not allow this, insisting that his cameramen, dressed in masks that are essentially cameras (as in the picture above), capture this moment. The wife and director stand in front of a storefront window, so that we can see the cameramen in the reflection. However, we cannot see the actual camera, as it is hidden by the actors' bodies at the center of the frame. Meta-meta-film, indeed.

The film tries to get across the notion that when one becomes an artist (or comedian), one's version of the world is warped in perhaps the same way that a businessman's is: a businessman might look at a mountain and see profit, a film director looks at people and sees a story. I have always wondered how actors, who so often marry one another, exist off-screen - their personal lives and fake lives so wrapped up with one another, their identities so amorphous. So too with writers who write about deeply personal things, for whom all their experiences are an opportunity to generate art. Such people excel at replicating universal elements of the human condition - but whether they ever lead real lives, I cannot say.