Short Take: Lost in America

With Lost in America, director, star, and co-writer Albert Brooks delivers a cutting, hilarious satire of the baby-boomer bourgeois mindset. Its targets range from 1960s nostalgia to careerist entitlement to yuppie consumerism. Brooks plays a thirtysomething Los Angeles advertising executive who, after getting a different promotion than he expected, throws a tantrum that gets him fired. He convinces his wife (Julie Hagerty) to quit her job, and seeing himself as kin to the outlaw counterculture bikers in the film Easy Rider, resolves to “drop out.” The couple sell their home, and decide to spend their lives seeing the “real America” while living off the land--in a 30-foot luxury recreational vehicle, with a six-figure cash “nest egg” for expenses. They of course lose the money, and find themselves in another “real America”: the one of trailer parks, employment agencies, and minimum-wage jobs. Brooks is a terrific comic actor. The protagonist is an entitled, obsessive-compulsive fussbudget, and Brooks inhabits the fellow so completely one might think he was living the part. The character’s frequent rants are small masterpieces of timing and delivery--both brilliantly orchestrated and dizzyingly funny. The script, co-written with Monica Johnson, gives the protagonist other comic opportunities, such as his hilarious dialogues with a casino pit boss (Garry Marshall) and an employment-agency job counselor (Art Frankel). But the picture’s most incisive bit is visual: the sight of these two upscale "drop-outs" tooling around the majestic landscapes of the American Southwest in their high-end Winnebago. It’s a terrific symbol of how absurdly pretentious bourgeois self-deception can get. This is a great American comedy. The cinematography is by Eric Saarinen.