How a Lifelong Friendship Yielded One of Rob Reiner’s Best Movies
Jim Hemphill
Forty years ago, Rob Reiner made his feature directorial debut with “This Is Spinal Tap,” the mockumentary that launched his career and ultimately became a comedy classic. (Reiner is currently in post-production on a long awaited sequel.) At around that same time, Reiner began thinking about making a riff on “My Dinner With Andre,” starring him and his lifelong friend Albert Brooks.
“I saw that movie and immediately thought, wow, I could sit with Albert at a deli, and it could be ‘My Dinner With Albert,'” Reiner told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “I said to Albert, ‘Let’s do it — we’ll sit in Jerry’s Deli or Art’s Deli and shoot for three or four days, and if you don’t like it, we throw it away.’ He never wanted to do it.”
Reiner never let go of the idea, however, and when he decided to make the focus Albert’s life and career, Brooks finally got on board. The result, HBO‘s “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life,” is Reiner’s first “real” documentary and one of his best films — no small praise considering his filmography includes “The Sure Thing,” “The Princess Bride,” “When Harry Met Sally…,” “Misery,” “A Few Good Men,” and “The American President.” Like those movies, “Defending My Life” is a smart, accessible, expertly engineered piece of filmmaking that gives serious ideas an entertaining expression.
“This is a documentary, but I’m still in show business,” Reiner said. “I like to tell a story. I like for it to move along. I read this biography of Frank Capra years ago, and he said if you’re asking people to pay money to go into a darkened room and sit there for two hours, there better be something there to entertain them. And that’s the way I approach things.” Because Brooks is one of the funniest men alive — and Reiner’s no slouch himself — “Defending My Life” fulfills Reiner’s ambitions spectacularly, providing more laughs per minute than just about any movie outside of Brooks’ own directorial efforts like “Lost in America,” “Defending Your Life,” and “Mother.”
The documentary is also, like those movies, about a lot more than just making the audience laugh. Using his conversation with Brooks, which was shot over the course of five hours and two “dinners,” as an anchor, Reiner expertly weaves archival footage, film clips, and commentary from Brooks’ admirers and collaborators into a portrait of a life that’s affectionate, thoughtful, and provides both a crash course in all things Albert Brooks and a snapshot of American comedy in the era that spawned him. It’s a lot for one movie to handle, but Reiner and editor Bob Joyce cover it all in an hour and a half without leaving anything out or feeling rushed.
“They have these documentaries that are two or three episodes, and it’s like, can’t you tell the story of a guy in 90 minutes?” Brooks said. “You can, but you have to be disciplined about it.” Once Reiner shot the interviews (both his own with Brooks and the interviews he conducted with the talking heads), the movie started to find a shape that went through Albert’s career one discipline at a time, tracing his evolution as a stand-up comic, filmmaker, actor, and novelist.
“It’s like any documentary. You’re basically writing with the pieces of film.” When choosing from the wealth of hilarious appearances Brooks made on various talk shows, Reiner picks the performances most emblematic of Brooks’ sensibility that he could let play out as much in their entirety as possible.
“Albert Brooks: Defending My Life” is, like many of Reiner’s films, a comedy with moments of genuine poignancy, particularly in a sequence focusing on the death of Brooks’ father. “I’ve known Albert since high school,” Reiner said. “We met when we were 16. So I know everything about Albert. I knew I wanted to get into his career, but I explained to him that it won’t be interesting unless we can get into the personal life. And I think that Albert felt comfortable enough with me to open up about some of those things.”
A trip to visit Brooks’ father’s resting place provides a rare and moving scene outside of the restaurant; another set piece, in which Reiner and Brooks visited Brooks’ childhood home, was removed during the edit. “It felt like we were doing a bit,” Reiner said.
Even though he’s known Brooks for most of his life, Reiner never ceases to be awed by his friend’s talent, which is why he wanted to make the documentary. “Younger people don’t know who he is, and I wanted to introduce them to this guy,” Reiner said, noting how fearless Brooks was in his approach. “He would go on national television without ever trying the bit out. Most comedians go into comedy clubs, they work things out, they hone it to a perfect five or six minutes. Albert never did that. He just said, ‘I like this. I think this is funny.’ And he went on and did it. That, to me, is the essence of Albert. He’s just brilliant. He’s a genius, and there’s nobody like him.”
“Albert Brooks: Defending My Life” is available to stream on Max.
