In 1973, PBS broadcast a 12-part documentary series entitled The American Family which follows a year in the life of the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California. At first glance an emblem of post-war American prosperity and happiness, the Louds slowly unravel as the show progresses, revealing cracks in the mother and father’s marriage and the tumult of teenage adolescence in a time of rapid social upheaval and growing pessimism.

Critics and scientists continue to debate the extent to which the presence of cameras everywhere The American Familywhich is generally considered the first example of an American reality TV show, merely showed the hidden side of a seemingly happy family or created suspense because the participants were aware that they were being filmed for public scrutiny. And it is precisely this angle that Albert Brooks explores in his feature-length directorial debut, Real Lifewhich is a silly parody of An American family‘s conceit before slowly curdling into a biting satire on the values ​​of American consumerism and the consequences that result when ordinary people are turned into spectacles of mass culture.

Brooks plays documentary producer Albert Brooks, who investigates Arizona veterinarian Warren Yeager (Charles Grodin) and his family. This further complicates the already difficult distinction between fact and fiction, and we become aware of the vanity that motivates Albert to make the documentary. As he notes in an early address to the camera, Albert can’t help but imagine that his film will win not only an Oscar, but possibly a Nobel Prize as well.

The majority of Real LifeThe catchiest jokes come right at the beginning, when Albert immediately makes it clear how much his project will undermine any possible pretense of objectivity. We see him conducting tests to find a suitable charismatic American family, subjecting adults and children to ordeals that seem more suited to Apollo astronaut screenings than documentaries, and the state-of-the-art cameras used to film the Yeagers are absurd contraptions that resemble diving helmets and could not be ignored by either the family or those around them. Albert even goes so far as to remodel the Yeagers’ house to give the cameramen better movement and to provide more variety in what they can document.

As soon as filming begins, the Yeagers themselves abandon what little naturalism remained in Albert’s concept. At their first on-camera dinner, Warren and his wife Jeannette (Frances Lee McCain) get into a minor argument, which Warren keeps interrupting to nervously tell the cameras that he and his wife don’t normally bicker, and his panic only deepens when his children (Lisa Urette and Robert Stirrat) contradict their parents. Grodin, a master of cringe comedy and naturalistic improvisation, portrays Warren as a man who constantly has one eye on the next camera with almost every sentence he utters, each new statement largely a frantic PR spin on the previous one.

Perhaps the most prescient scene in the film is when the crew films Warren performing surgery on a horse. Nervous by the pressure of the shots, Warren becomes confused and orders a double dose of anesthetic, which kills the animal. Tormented not only by his mistake but by the awareness of the consequences its broadcast would have on his career, Warren implores Albert to destroy the footage. But the documentarian gently assures him that everything will be fine and his practice will not suffer. Albert’s ingratiating but firm refusal to sacrifice a good angle for someone’s actual livelihood is an eerie harbinger of an era in which reality TV producers are regularly reprimanded for manipulating footage to heighten drama.

Albert cannot completely hide his disgust at this ethical humiliation, and when Real Life suffers compared to his subsequent films, it is largely because the empathy he brings to his characters is undermined by the offensiveness he feels towards the implications of reality TV. He pities the Yeagers more than he embodies their fears, while portraying his documentary filmmaker as so morally corrupt that he stands in the way of humanity at large. Still, Real Life embodies Brooks’ unique voice in the diverse comedy landscape of the 1970s. If this seems like a somewhat lesser achievement than his subsequent films, that’s only because Brooks continued to hone his considerable talents over the next two decades of his career.

Image/Sound

This UHD transfer comes from a 4K restoration approved by Albert Brooks and offers an incredibly film-like presentation. Naturally lit exterior shots have a bright, slightly washed-out quality inherent to the original image, while the neutral tones and soft interior lighting that define the interiors of the Yeager home have a clear level of detail and natural color gradations. The lossless mono is clear and expertly balances dialogue and background effects such as street noise and the gentle scurrying of cameramen scurrying around the Yeagers.

Extras

The Criterion Collection disc contains relatively few extras. In separate interviews, Brooks and actor Frances Lee McCain share their memories of making the film, with Brooks also offering insights into his career before the film. The disc also includes Brooks’ high-profile theatrical trailer for Real Lifean amusing short film that is reminiscent of his experimental films for Saturday Night Live which contains no footage itself and uses a blurry pseudo-3D filter for comic effect. An essay in the booklet by critic AS Hamrah contextualizes Brooks’ satire as a reaction not only to the earliest form of reality TV, but also to the wave of direct cinema documentary made popular by the likes of Jean Rouch and DA Pennebaker.

In total

Albert Brooks’ caustic feature film debut receives an excellent 4K edition from Criterion.