Lost in America
Albert Brooks (1985)
The BFI brochure for this month gave the running time as 91 minutes. Their programme note, which I glanced at on the way in, said 114 and I spent the film assuming that was a correction of the brochure. When Lost in America ended after an hour and a half, it came as a surprise – and, sad to say, a relief. Albert Brooks’s satirical road comedy supplies the name of the current BFI season of which it forms parts (‘Lost in America: The Other Side of Reagan’s 80s’). It’s a zeitgeist film, no question, but I didn’t enjoy it. I felt uncomfortable too because of main reason for not enjoying it was the two leads – Brooks and Julie Hagerty – who are proficient, hardworking but monotonous.
David Howard (Brooks) is creative director in the Los Angeles office of a big advertising agency. His wife Linda (Hagerty) is head of personnel at an LA department store. When David is denied the promotion to senior vice-president he was expecting and refuses a transfer to New York, he throws a tantrum, gets fired and immediately persuades Linda to give up her job too. Years ago, when their contemporaries were taking time out to ‘find themselves’, David and Linda were responsibly earning and building careers. If they sell their house now, the Howards will have enough funds to buy a top-of-the-range motor home and still have a nest egg of more than $100,000. Inspired by cherished memories of Easy Rider, the couple can now drop out and go ‘looking for America’ but with money in the bank. They sell up and buy a Winnebago. In the opening scene, David, ahead of his ill-fated promotion interview the next day, is having a sleepless night and ensuring Linda gets one too. They fretfully discuss the drawbacks of a life dictated by being ‘responsible’. The pivotal events that follow in Lost in America derive from the Howards’ acting irresponsibly – or, at least, impulsively. Their on-the-road project is the result of David’s fury with his bosses. Not long into their travels, during an overnight stay in Las Vegas, his wife loses their entire savings in a casino.
After Linda has reduced their worldly goods to the Winnebago and $800, the Howards end up in Safford, Arizona, where they try to find work. David, explaining that he used to earn a hundred grand a year plus bonuses but has come to Safford to ‘change my life’, greatly amuses his interviewer at the local employment agency: ‘You couldn’t change it on $100,000?’ David takes the only job currently available, as a crossing guard: he earns $5.50 an hour for the privilege of being insulted by teenage schoolkids. The manager of the fast-food chain selling hot dogs, where Linda is taken on as ‘assistant manager’, looks about sixteen too. The Howards abandon their dream, though they do drive virtually across the country to get to New York. There, in the last scene, a re-suited David jumps out of the Winnebago and immediately spots the advertising executive he refused to have as a superior and lavishly insulted back in LA. Legends on the screen explain that David resumed working with the same advertising firm, that Linda got a job at Bloomingdale’s and is now expecting their first child. (The couple’s childlessness has been conspicuous but unmentioned up to this point.)
The film, with a screenplay by Albert Brooks and Monica Johnson, taps into the malaise of a particular generation of Americans – or part of it: those who steered clear of late 1960s counterculture and now, approaching early middle age, are materially comfortable but perennially anxious and dissatisfied. My problem with the central pairing from the start was that they looked a generation apart. Brooks was thirty-seven and Julie Hagerty twenty-nine when the film was made but his stockiness and her little-girl voice accentuate the age gap. Both are baby boomers but, even taking the actors’ ages literally, David would have been twenty-two and Linda fourteen when Easy Rider came out. My problem with the storyline was Linda’s outbreak of gambling addiction. It’s a moment of madness, to be sure – a prolonged one – but incredible as the kind of madness this particular character would exhibit. There’s nothing in the plot to give it plausibility. Linda and David intend to renew their marriage vows in Las Vegas and decide to spend the night in a decent hotel before doing so next morning. They have to bribe a clerk to give them what turns out to be a cramped ‘junior’ honeymoon suite, with heart-shaped twin beds – vexing but hardly enough for Linda, who’s much less impatient than David anyway, to be at the end of her tether.
Their experiences in Las Vegas and Arizona disillusion David and Linda although the ending – the idea that he could easily resume his career after what’s happened – seems somewhat of a fantasy too (even with, as the closing legend notes, a 31% pay cut but better medical benefits). All these objections may be literal-minded but they’re pretty fundamental, given the set-up and themes of Lost in America. The theatrical release poster showed the two main characters in a desert landscape, their heads buried in the sand. The implication of the poster and the film as a whole is that the Howards were fooling themselves that the nice idea of a new life could ever have worked. But the destruction of their dream results almost entirely from Linda’s gambling – so wildly improbable and out of character that it’s hard to read as an illustration of why the longing for freedom of people like these is doomed to failure.
Albert Brooks deserves credit for avoiding genre cliches: the yuppie protagonists don’t get involved in car chases, sexual misunderstandings or scary encounters with types of fellow American who might be from another planet. Brooks’s and Monica Johnson’s dialogue is often witty and realistically repetitive, even when the situations in which it’s spoken don’t convince. As a performer, though, Brooks lacks variety and a capacity to surprise and Julie Hagerty is a bigger problem, through a combination of her insecurely written role and her own idiosyncrasies. It’s not much consolation that the latter somewhat mask the former. Linda switches from moderately successful professional into little wife – David does all the driving while she microwaves toasted sandwiches. The lack of difficulty or tension in her metamorphosis is explicable only thanks to Hagerty’s cartoon ingénue quality.
The leads epitomise how poorly Lost in America compares with the following year’s Something Wild, which has also screened as part of the ‘Other Side of Reagan’s 80s’ season. The minor characters, although Brooks treats them less generously than Jonathan Demme, are often relatively successful. Michael Greene is good as David’s boss in Los Angeles. Garry Marshall, better known as a director of TV and films (including Pretty Woman), is excellent as the casino manager whom David begs to return the six-figure sum Linda has blown. The opening sequence comprises, before anyone appears, a radio interview with the movie critic Rex Reed – distinctive and absorbing though I didn’t understand its significance. (Once David, in bed with Linda, comes into view, he switches the radio off.) Some of the road sequences seem like padding – an obligatory break from the dominant verbal exchanges – but at least the long drive back at the end is an opportunity to hear Frank Sinatra sing ‘New York, New York’ in its entirety.
21 May 2018