Albert Brooks, like Woody Allen, is a classic whiner, able to turn middle-class trauma and self-obsession into movie art. “Mother” is his latest kvetch, and one of his funniest: a droll vivisection of family ties about a 40-year-old science-fiction writer who tries to get to the core of his bad relationships with women by moving back in with his sixtysomething mother.
Writer-director Brooks plays the son, hack novelist John Henderson. And the mom, Beatrice, is played by Debbie Reynolds. It’s inspired casting. Reynolds, legendary for her sparkly girl-next-door beauty and ebullience in the ’50s and ’60s, here deliberately dampens her fire.
She plays Beatrice as a slow-moving if inwardly shrewd old gal, who seems a beat or so behind any conversation and can’t handle too-modern mechanisms — like the picture phone sent by her other son, Jeff, the sports agent (Rob Morrow). But, stubborn as she may be, Beatrice has adjusted to life, which John definitely hasn’t.
A bundle of neuroses, John blames them all on his mom, along with his lousy choices of women. Why else would he keep picking partners who can’t appreciate him? And who all seem to resemble Mom? With a visionary’s fervor, John decides to move from L.A. back to Sausalito, and to reclaim his old room, redecorating it with his schoolkid ’60s stuff. Moving in with Mom, he believes, will enable him to solve his female troubles.
It’s a silly-sounding project: a voyage into sentimental self-psychoanalysis. As the experiment goes on, John begins to act like a huge spoiled brat. He embarrasses his mother with sexual chatter in front of neighbors or sales clerks, gripes about her refrigerator habits. And his brother — who always seemed their mother’s favorite — begins to get jealous.
This, Brooks is suggesting, is what many families are: messy and unpredictable, stubborn and surprising, close but antagonistic, mad but friendly — a comedy as much as a tragedy. The movie’s biggest joke is that John’s absurd experiment does work. Maybe.
Albert Brooks’ real name is Albert Einstein (his father was comic Harry “Paryakarkus” Einstein), and sometimes he seems to have discovered a new quantum theory of comedy. He’s a remarkable mix: a secretly against-the-grain conformist, whose characters are trapped in a world of pure plastic. In movies like “Lost in America” or “Defending Your Life,” Brooks shows a low-key genius for catching the nervous self-deluded babbling and quasi-intellectual rationalizations of half-sophisticated, half-naive modern Baby Boomers.
He’s unique: such a smart, subtle comedian — so sweetly tuned in to the bland surfaces and weird undercurrents of American middle-class life — that sometimes his jokes seem in danger of flying right over his audience.
That shouldn’t be a problem with “Mother,” a movie with jokes everyone should catch, primal emotions we can all share. Though Brooks’ tone is tart, there’s a core of real seriousness in the movie. It’s about the sometimes wounding consequences of depending too much on parents, saddling them with too much responsibility or blame, failing to see or accept them as people.
Brooks is great at nailing Boomer malaise, and his movie, in a way, is also about trying (and failing) to recapture the ’60s and its illusions of freedom. Henderson is supposed to be 40, but often he seems closer to Brooks’ own age of 49 — especially when you see the stuff on his re-created boyhood room: posters of Jimi Hendrix, “2001” and “Barbarella.”
When Brooks unveils his big musical gag, it’s purest ’60s. He’s cooked up an amazing pastiche of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” rewritten as “Here’s to You, Mrs. Henderson,” played under John’s drive to his mother’s Sausalito home.
Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate,” for which “Mrs. Robinson” was written, was the prototypical bittersweet late-’60s youth romance, all about breaking away from your family (and seductive older women), escaping the traps of hypocrisy and conformity. So, when Brooks plays “Mrs. Henderson” (like the “Easy Rider” musical parodies in “Lost in America”) he’s making fun of a countercultural mainstay while reversing its meaning. And he’s also evoking what that song — and movie — mean to John, who, like Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock, has always been “a little worried about his future.”
When I was a kid, Debbie Reynolds and Shirley MacLaine were my two big movie actress crushes. I still love watching them. And it’s fascinating, in the current releases of “Mother” and “Evening Star,” to see how much charm, energy and talent they’ve retained through four movie decades.
Reynolds’ movie career has been almost moribund since 1971, about the time she turned down Nichols’ offer of the Ann-Margret part in “Carnal Knowledge.” But she’s terrific here. Audiences who haven’t seen her for a while may think she’s playing herself: doddering old Debbie, queen of M.G.M. memory lane. But this is a real performance — shrewdly observed, meticulously played.
The young Reynolds was a red-headed dynamo, the classic American cheerleader type. Here, she’s a classic middle-class grandma. As Beatrice, she’s mastered Brooks’ whole dry, careful, endearingly loopy comic style. Their arguments, which have deliberate comic undercurrents of romantic antagonism, are wonderful. And, when she does her angry confrontation scenes, she helps raise the film to another level.
The jokes have an edge, but they aren’t forced. Though some of the humor is bitter, it isn’t mean. And, wittily written as it is, “Mother” also has visual style. The photography is by Lajos Koltai, regular cinematographer for Hungary’s Istvan Szabo (“Mephisto”); he gives the movie a dreamily easy look.
“Mother” already has received some astonishing reviews, and last Sunday it won the Best Screenplay Prize of the National Society of Film Critics, for Brooks and Monica Johnson. The accolades aren’t undeserved — but I don’t think it’s a flawless movie. As before, Brooks seems to have difficulty wrapping up his story, perhaps because he doesn’t want to take his film too far in the dark direction the buildup suggests.
Yet, overall, “Mother” is a fine, smart, curious comedy about a moving subject, handled with a sharp wit that only partially masks the feeling beneath. “No actual mothers were harmed during the making of this picture,” reads the disclaimer in “Mother’s” credits. No imaginary mothers either. Here’s to you, Mrs. Henderson. And Ms. Reynolds, too.
”MOTHER”
(star) (star) (star) 1/2
Directed by Albert Brooks; written by Brooks, Monica Johnson; photographed by Lajos Koltai; edited by Harvey Rosenstock; production designed by Charles Rosen; music by Marc Shaiman; produced by Scott Rudin, Herb Nanas. A Paramount release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:44. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
John Henderson …………………….. Albert Brooks
Beatrice Henderson …………………. Debbie Reynolds
Jeff Henderson …………………….. Rob Morrow
Linda .. ………………………….. Lisa Kudrow
Cheryl Henderson …………………… Isabel Glasser
Charles …………………………… Peter White
