Defending Your Life

I think I mentioned last year in the run-up to Christmas how TCM ends its Christmas programming right on December 25 and how that's something I don't particuarly care for. Last year, their prime-time lineup for Christmas was movies set in the hereafter, including one that was new to me, Defending Your Life.

Albert Brooks plays Daniel Miller, one of those go-go yuppie types that populated comedies of the 1980s, although this one came out at the tail end of that era, already in 1991. He's a Los Angeles-based ad exec who has finally done well enough in life that he's able to get a BMW, although it's a low-end model at $39K. But it even has a CD player in the sound system, which goes along with the player and CDs his colleagues have just gotten him for his birthday. As Daniel drops the top on his BMW and plays CDs, his fast driving and being in the elements cause the unsecured CD cases to scatter on the floor of the front of the car. Daniel rather stupidly -- or recklessly -- tries to pick them up at the same time he's driving, with the predictable result that he doesn't see the city bus that he's about to hit and in so doing kill himself.

The next thing we see, Daniel is on the way to Judgment City, which is an analogue of the afterlife although this isn't quite a Christian vision of the afterlife. There's a lot the feels like heaven in that there's all you can eat, without gaining an ounce, golf courses galore, or other similar amusements for whatever you're into. And there must be a bunch of Judgment Cities, since this one is specifically designed to be familiar to people from the western part of the United States.

But, as I said, it's not a Christian heaven or even purgatory. The next morning, Daniel is to meet Bob Diamond (Rip Torn). Bob is a sort of defense attorney. He informs Daniel that they know the average human being uses only 10% of their brain and that Daniel is, like a lot of people, average. Here in Judgment City everybody uses close to half their brain or more. And that's part of what Judgment City is about. You'll go on a sort of trial where it's determined whether you're using enough of your brain to overcome your human fears and other sorts of ways of acting that are going to lead to sadness in normal life. If so, you get to move "forward"; otherwise, you'll be reincarnated to try again and hopefully have learned something from your past life that you will however not remember. Bob is, as I said, Daniel's defender. Given the job of proving that Daniel needs to be reincarnated is Lena Foster (Lee Grant).

The "trial", such as it is, involves looking at incident's from the decedent's life where Lena will be arguing that this proves Daniel had all sorts of fears he still needs to work on, while Bob will be trying to show that these incidents show human growth. The whole trial will take several days, during which Daniel will be staying in the lap of luxury and be given the opportunity to spend his free time exploring Judgment City.

One day, Daniel meets Julia (Meryl Streep), who for some reason he feels like he might know. The two hit it off, and visit various attractions in the city in what are in part designed to be a bit of light comic relief from the light drama of the trial. But along the way the two also feel like they're falling in love with each other. This is going to cause a big problem later: Julia's life seems as though she's finally figured things out on Earth and will not be reincarnated, while in Daniel's case that's much less certain. Will our two lovers be able to spend all eternity together?

Defending Your Life apparently got pretty high praise when it was first released. I mostly liked it, although I also have to say that I don't know if I'd give it quite as much praise as contemporary critics did. I'd guess that was in part because Streep hadn't done much comedy in her career before this, and that was a revelation to the critics of the day. Then again, from the othr Albert Brooks movies I've seen he's not quite my thing. The idea in Defending Your Life is quite a good one, although parts of it give off the impression that Brooks was either trying too hard, or else going for an in-joke here and there. It's not that this makes the movie bad or anything so much it was for me more of a, "Yeah, I get it already" feeling.

In any case, Defending Your Life is definitely worth a watch if you get the chance to see it.