In praise of Modern Romance – Albert Brooks’… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

In praise of Mod­ern Romance – Albert Brooks’ masterpiece

05 Aug 2016

Words by Craig Williams

Two individuals embracing, a man with curly hair and a woman with long hair, gazing at each other affectionately.
Two individuals embracing, a man with curly hair and a woman with long hair, gazing at each other affectionately.
The actor/director’s 1981 rom-com is one of the best films ever made about jeal­ousy and self-loathing.

He’s got a Porsche and a good-look­ing girl – what’s his prob­lem?” Thus read one of the com­ment cards from an ear­ly focus group screen­ing of Albert Brooks’ 1981 mas­ter­piece Mod­ern Romance. In a 2007 Esquire inter­view, Brooks described how Colum­bia Pic­tures’ ini­tial delight with the film dis­in­te­grat­ed into despair after the afore­men­tioned test screen­ing. Add a psy­chi­a­trist scene,” stu­dio head Frank Price told him. Brooks demand­ed to know why, to which Price respond­ed Explain it!” Not only did the demand go against every­thing Mod­ern Romance was try­ing to do, the very notions of relata­bil­i­ty and com­pro­mise were anath­e­ma to Brooks as a come­di­an and an artist.

Though already well-known as an actor through films like Taxi Dri­ver, where he played Travis Bickle’s prig­gish love rival, and Broad­cast News, which earned him an Oscar nom­i­na­tion in 1988 for Best Sup­port­ing Actor, Brooks is also one of the great Amer­i­can film­mak­ers of his gen­er­a­tion. While his films have always attract­ed a cer­tain cult fol­low­ing – the crit­ic Jonathan Rosen­baum includ­ed 1979’s Real Life on his list of the top 100 Amer­i­can movies – they are all too fre­quent­ly over­looked, espe­cial­ly in the UK, where avail­abil­i­ty has long been an issue. To be fair, Brooks has hard­ly been pro­lif­ic (sev­en films in almost 40 years), but his work has helped shape the land­scape of Amer­i­can com­e­dy, from the pio­neer­ing meta­tex­tu­al mock­u­men­tary style of Real Life to the self-lac­er­at­ing take­down of boomer nar­cis­sism in Lost in Amer­i­ca.

The laughs in his pic­tures come not only from the ter­rif­ic one-lin­ers, but from Brooks’ unique sense of com­ic pac­ing – with scenes often stretched to bring out as much awk­ward­ness as pos­si­ble – as well as a self-reflex­ive streak that recalls his com­e­dy antecedent Jer­ry Lewis. Writ­ing about Brooks for the AV Club, Scott Tobias and Nathan Rabin argued that his com­e­dy rests on the dual­i­ty in his films between scathing satire and cel­e­bra­to­ry nar­cis­sism. Mod­ern Romance is his mas­ter­piece, and, not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, it is the film that best cap­tures this duality.

Brooks him­self plays Robert, a film edi­tor who breaks up with his long-suf­fer­ing girl­friend Mary (Kathryn Har­rold), then wor­ries that he’s made a huge mis­take and tries to win her back. It essen­tial­ly plays out as a rom-com in reverse, careen­ing through the tra­di­tion­al tropes and fol­low­ing a com­mon nar­ra­tive tra­jec­to­ry, all while sub­vert­ing each cliché along the way. The cen­tral thrust of the rom-com as a genre is the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness – mak­ing it as Amer­i­can an idea as the west­ern or the gang­ster pic­ture – which usu­al­ly takes the form of mar­riage or a last­ing, monog­a­mous rela­tion­ship. The genius of Mod­ern Romance is that it still retains this thrust, but what sep­a­rates it from so many cor­ner­stones of the genre is that this elu­sive hap­py end­ing is pur­sued through nar­cis­sism, neu­roses and cru­el­ty. The sense of hope that is inte­gral to the rom-com – the inher­ent faith in the rela­tion­ship being por­trayed – is replaced with despair. 

Robert doesn’t want Mary back because he loves her, he wants her back because he dreads the uncer­tain­ty of the future. Tobias not­ed how the pic­ture forms an unlike­ly com­pan­ion piece to Mar­tin Scorsese’s Rag­ing Bull, which was released the pre­vi­ous year. Both Robert and Jake La Mot­ta are moti­vat­ed by an unseem­ly com­bi­na­tion of nar­cis­sism and self-hatred, but where the lat­ter projects it through real vio­lence, the for­mer does so through pas­sive aggres­sion. Though the film opens with a break-up, Robert’s aim is still that of many rom-com pro­tag­o­nists, i.e. mar­riage. In this sense it’s still a quin­tes­sen­tial rom-com at heart, but in Brooks’ hands it becomes a fun­ny, pes­simistic pur­suit of unhap­pi­ness – an anti-Amer­i­can Dream. 

The best rom-coms will often dou­ble up as the­ses on their own gen­der pol­i­tics, form­ing an extend­ed dialec­tic on the roman­tic dynam­ic between the cen­tral cou­ple that runs along­side the pri­ma­ry nar­ra­tive. In a crit­i­cal cli­mate where ide­ol­o­gy is increas­ing­ly becom­ing the sole prism through which a pic­ture is viewed, the insep­a­ra­bil­i­ty of a great rom-com’s ide­o­log­i­cal and aes­thet­ic con­cerns should encour­age us to broad­en the way we think about the genre. With this in mind, Mod­ern Romance may be a film about male ego, but, like Elaine May’s The Heart­break Kid or Mary Harron’s Amer­i­can Psy­cho, the exe­cu­tion – the direct­ing, writ­ing, edit­ing – lac­er­ates that very ego. Part of Brooks’ bril­liance is in cre­at­ing a mon­ster by exag­ger­at­ing cer­tain traits that will be very real to a big pro­por­tion of his audience.

With its auteurist take on love and male neu­roses, the films of Woody Allen are an obvi­ous point of com­par­i­son when dis­cussing Mod­ern Romance, but the dark­ness that under­lies the film points to more unex­pect­ed influ­ences. Stan­ley Kubrick, for exam­ple, loved it, and told Brooks that it was the movie he’d always want­ed to make about jeal­ousy. This speaks to the mal­leabil­i­ty and scale of Brooks’ com­e­dy. The themes he was explor­ing could be played as a rom-com like Mod­ern Romance, or skewed to a dark­er, more insid­i­ous aes­thet­ic, like in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the movie about jeal­ousy he did even­tu­al­ly make. It shows the kind of reach that Brooks had as a film­mak­er, and it’s about time he received the appre­ci­a­tion he deserves.

The Bad­lands Col­lec­tive will present a rare 35mm screen­ing of Mod­ern Romance at The Prince Charles Cin­e­ma in Lon­don on 11 August 2016 at 8:45. Tick­ets are avail­able at princecharlescin​e​ma​.com

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