Review: Defending Your Life (1991)

Albert Brooks’ 1991 film Defending Your Life is an amusing, if ultimately unsatisfying, entry in the broad pseudo-genre of movies about the afterlife. In the film, a recently deceased yuppie marketing executive, Daniel Miller (played by Brooks) finds himself in Judgment City, a intermediate realm between this and the next life where Daniel will face a hearing that will determine whether he moves on to the next stage of existence, or must return to Earth to see if he can successfully deal with the fears and anxieties that keep him in this purgatorial state. While undergoing his hearing, Daniel meets and finds himself falling in love with Julia (Meryl Streep), another recently deceased person. The central dilemma of the film hinges on whether Daniel will find himself judged worthy to accompany Julia on to the next life, or be forced to be reincarnated once again.

The afterlife as setting curiously has a long pedigree in cinema, going back to such classic films as Heaven Can Wait and A Matter of Life and Death, or more recently films such as Pixar’s Soul or my personal favourite, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998). What makes these films particularly intriguing is how, for the most part, they eschew more religiously specific notions of the afterlife, for instance a Christian Heaven, Hell or Purgatory, for more universal and post-religious visions. Furthermore, they often take cinema itself as a metaphor or visual shorthand for the past life. Defending Your Life fits into this cinematic portrayal of the afterlife very well, portraying Judgment City as a non-sectarian vision, rooted, as the film notes, in the experiences of Californian culture of the 1980s and 90s.

In the film, Judgment City is a kind of bland office park, with trams and modernist buildings, always a balmy 70 degrees. Between the sessions where you undergo your review, a selection of film clips from your life (despite the name of the city, the film strenuously tries to avoid the notion of real moral judgment), you’re free to enjoy yourself, eating food that won’t make you fat and lounging in cozy white gowns that are a lot like the kinds of robes one might wear at a day spa.

There’s something very postmodern about Judgment City, in the sense that theorist Fredric Jameson defined as indicative of the ahistorical, flat pastiche that signified life at the end of the twentieth century. This is, of course, wholly appropriate to Brooks’s main character, as Daniel is an avatar of the kind of self-centred, unattached “yuppie” of the late-80s and early 90s. He dies by smashing his brand new BMW into a bus while reaching for a CD on the floor of the car. He has no family or friends of note. His work is his life. He’s a softer, less sociopathic version of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, but our judgment is implicit in Brooks’s choice to portray the character as such.

Brooks’s performance in the film is interesting. Brooks often plays characters who are simultaneously neurotically self-critical, if sarcastic. With Daniel leans beyond bemused sarcasm towards a kind of detachment. He’s barely upset to find himself dead. And while there’s a very late-twentieth century notion of Jewish masculinity that Brooks has mined very successfully (a cousin of the Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen-types, but more self-aware and less abrasive), Daniel Miller is ultimately a kind of flat character compared with other Brooks’ performances.And this is the film’s key flaw in my mind.

Defending Your Life isn’t a biting film. It’s a fairly gentle if humorous film, but for it to carry any real dramatic weight beyond the straightforwardly earnest romantic dilemma, we must have a real set of stakes in Daniel’s judgment.

Daniel’s defense attorney for the review of his life is Bob Diamond, an affable but slightly unhinged (as usual) Rip Torn. Diamond is eager to assure Daniel that he isn't being “judged” per se, and that nothing too bad will happen to him regardless—he’ll just be sent back to Earth to try again. Thus, the romance with Streep’s affable yet luminous Julia is the main hook to make us care.

Some of the film’s funniest bits involve the actual review of Daniel’s case, where the prosecutor and Diamond bring up various episodes from his life, to be reviewed in what is essentially a small movie theatre and from there make a decision on whether Daniel has overcome his “fear” and developed a sense of courage. Ultimately, it’s not Daniel’s moral state that will determine his fate, but whether he has self-actualized (Diamond repeats the old canard that humans only use 10% of their brain). While Daniel comes across as not entirely pathetic, the final decision ends up hinging on the lessons Daniel has learned during his stay in Judgement City rather than any actual defense of his actions in life.

Given Brooks’ mild critiques of yuppie culture and the clearly satirical concept, the fact that Daniel’s fate ultimately rests on a kind of self-actualization so typical of Californian culture in the late-twentieth century comes across as a bit double-minded. Are we supposed to take any of this seriously? The conflict between the film’s sense of playfulness and critique coupled with the earnestness of the romance and the genre conventions that, along with the compelling nature of Streep and Brooks as performers, encourage us to cheer for them to enter the next stage of eternity together, leaves the film as double-minded.

There are some enjoyable moments in the film and Defending Your Life is certainly more ambitious in aspects than most studio comedies today. But in keeping with the flatness of Judgment City, it is also visually a fairly flat film. It lacks much in terms of visual complexity, lacking the visual verve that such fantastical visions might offer. The film hints at having a more profound statement to make about what makes life meaningful and worth living. I appreciated that it wasn’t as self-serious as a film like Pixar’s Soul, but at the same time I finished the film not quite sure what I felt about the overall experience. Not sharp enough to really be a critique of modern life, but too high-concept and satirical to take too seriously, Defending Your Life left me wanting more. 

5 out of 10

Defending Your Life (1991, USA)

Written and directed by Albert Brooks; starring Brooks, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn, Lee Grant, Buck Henry.

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