Real Life

Helmed by Albert Brooks, Real Life follows a filmmaker (Brooks’ Albert Brooks) as he sets out to film an American family for a full year and, perhaps inevitably, encounters a series of complications and problems. It’s an intriguing (and impressively prescient) premise that’s employed to exceedingly hit-and-miss effect by Brooks, as the first-time director delivers a somewhat one-note narrative that grows more and more repetitious as time progresses – with the movie’s mostly episodic midsection doing little to alleviate the progressively uninvolving and underwhelming atmosphere. (And it doesn’t help, certainly, that Brooks has flooded the proceedings with unfunny, unpleasant sequences, including an interminable episode wherein Brooks’ subject kills a horse.) There’s little doubt, then, that Real Life‘s saving grace is a first half that contains a small handful of relatively entertaining interludes and a predictably affable turn by Brooks, although, in terms of the latter, the writer/director’s increasingly frantic and hysterical performance becomes awfully tedious and, eventually, exacerbates the already-tiresome closing stretch – which ultimately does cement the picture’s place as a sporadically watchable yet predominantly disappointing debut from an exceedingly talented filmmaker.

** out of ****