WEBSITE DISCLAIMER: The Unofficial Lost in America Page claims no copyright holding for the following review, and indeed, the webmaster has no idea whom to contact about said copyright. If the copyright owner of this review wishes to have the review withdrawn from this site, he/she may contact the webmaster here. -- Steve Bailey, Webmaster, Steve Bailey's Lost in America Page

(SPOILER ALERT: This review gives virtually the entire plot of the movie. Read no further if you haven't seen the movie first.)

The theme of Getting Away from It All wasn't invented in America, but it might as well have been. At least since Walden, Americans have been a bit haunted by guilt for not living in raw nature and for doing work that might possibly make money. Two recent films are right in that line. The Mean Season is a crime thriller enclosed in the frame of a Miami reporter's determination to break from big-city success and become a small-town editor in Colorado. But we won't talk about The Mean Season. It isn't badly made, but the script's idiocies sink it beneath discussion.

The other is Lost in America, the latest comedy from an amusing troublemaker named Albert Brooks. The first two features he wrote and directed and starred in, Real Life and Modern Romance, established him as a volubly but gently disturbing exposer of sillinesses. His new film--Monica Johnson is co-author this time--is about that recurrent Walden guilt, particularly in males, particularly males who see themselves trapped on the escalator of success. Lost in America isn't as pungent as it might be: the dialogue has flaccid patches; the story just goes on for a while, then knocks off rather than concludes. But two elements give it some charm. First, its ease. Lately most American films have seemed to be spinoffs of MTV or about raunchy teenagers or both. Brooks floats amiably.

Second, the ironies. They begin early. Number one: Brooks doesn't have an overwhelming impulse to get away from the hurly-burly; he quits because the hurly-burly lets him down. He's a whiz in a Los Angeles advertising agency, so sure of a promotion that he has made a payment on a new house and is pricing a big Mercedes. Instead of promotion, the boss offers him a sideways move, transfer to New York. He quits, browned off by disappointment in business rather than by surfeit of it. He convinces his wife, the somewhat wispy Julie Hagerty, that they should liquidate their assets--they can put together about two hundred thou--buy a motor van, and go out into American and live. Really live real life. As he says, "Touch Indians."

They are in for surprises, we know, the sort that await hyped-up sophisticates who think that life is any realer one place than another. But one surprise surprises us, too: Hagerty has a gambling obsession. (Surprising, too, that Brooks didn't know this after eight years of marriage, but let it pass.) They reach Las Vegas, and one night while Brooks is sleeping, Hagerty goes to the roulette table and blows their entire bankroll. This puts their quest for innocence in jeopardy--and adds another irony. Their pastoral simplicity depends on their big-city bucks. Plus the irony that, chasing pastoral purity though they are, when they get to a money-dripping place, Hagerty can't resist the chance to scoop up some of it.

They are now broke. Simplicity begins to look threadbare: In an Arizona town, they get jobs in order to eat. He can't quite find anything in his $100,000 range, so he takes a crossing-guard job at $5.50 an hour. She goes to work in a fast-food joint.

This is more truth than they had bargained for. They can't stand it. They scoot for New York, where, by eating humble pie (not the term he uses), he gets the job he had spurned in L.A. Nothing, not even the closing titles, tells us that they have Learned from their experience, that at least they now have a shrine of pristine memory in their hearts. They are just glad to be back in the Madison Avenue rat race (which, as any farmer or village storekeeper could tell them, is only one form of the rat race).

This is the film's last, best ironic truth. Lost in America strikes a small, if not quite sharp enough, blow at the sentimentalities about the superiority of country over city, moral and otherwise, the superiority of subsistence over comfort. I wonder how long that big-time reporter in The Mean Season lasted in Colorado, how contentedly. Brooks and wife are not morally superior to anybody outside New York, but at least now they know they are not arbitrarily inferior, and the United States has two narcotic addicts fewer.

*

Go to:
Links page
Home page