Foolish fellows! If they had just waited a few years, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper could have been really Easy Riders. Instead of discovering America from the jolting seats of their motorcycles, they could have cruised along in the stolid comfort of an RV. With, maybe, the little woman fixing toasted cheese sandwiches in the microwave.
Perhaps nothing so clearly shows how times have a-changed since 1969 than the choice of vehicles David Howard (Albert Brooks) makes when, having been passed over for promotion at the ad agency, he decides to seek true values on the open road. Somehow he talks his wife Linda (Julie Hagerty), a straight arrow with several bentfeathers, into risking all their capital on this trundle into self-discovery. Their itinerary, compared with that of their role models, is truncated and painfully mainstream. It consists largely of Las Vegas, where she loses their nest egg in a night, and Hoover Dam, where they have a marital wrangle the scope of which matches the backdrop. But never mind this minimalism. Brooks (who directed Lost
in America and co-wrote it with Monica Johnson) is a shrewd, deadpan observer of the secret life of middle-class Americans. He likes to bring their dreams of glorious escape to life, let them taste their new world, then watch them scurry back to the comfortable and
familiar. His comedy would be cruel if Brooks were not so good at playing the victims he concocts: so pompously thrilled as he rationalizes their lurches off the beaten track, so bone scared when things go awry. In Hagerty and Garry Marshall, the TV mastermind who plays a casino boss, he has glorious foils. Lost in America does not conclude; it merely ends, as if Brooks had run out of money or inspiration before he could think up a third act. But the year is unlikely to produce a funnier unfinished symphony.
Copyright (c) 1985, Time Inc. Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher. Go to:
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