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

It is too bad that in Lost in America Albert Brooks is only kidding; all the film needs to be a devastating comedy is a little seriousness. The impossibility of breaking out of the system, the robotization of the career-oriented, upwardly mobile middle-class couple who, even with a shove of fate to nudge them along, cannot start afresh in some spontaneous, grass-roots, laterally mobile way, has powerful seriocomic potential; not for nothing has Preston Sturges's name been invoked in connection with this film. But despite a fine farcical frenzy, acute observation of everyday absurdities, and some wrenchingly comic episodes, the film cannot lift itself into high comedy, even if it towers over whatever else is around.

David Howard (Albert Brooks) is a Los Angeles advertising executive who expects to become vice president on the morrow. He and his wife, Linda (Julie Hagerty), have already made a $15,000 deposit on a $450,000 house; a yacht and a Mercedes are in the offing; and all that keeps him awake tonight is compulsive worrying. All that keeps Linda, a seemingly contented department-store personnel manager, awake is David with his nagging doubts. Small ones, mind you; the next day, he is totally unprepared for the blow of mere transferral to New York and a fancier account--no vice presidency, no immediate raise above the present $100,000, but a supposedly great opportunity to become even more "creative." First flabbergasted, then infuriated, David insults the boss and gets himself fired. He is hysterically exultant, gets Linda to quit, too (in his eagerness for freedom, he can barely be restrained from making love to her on the desk of her glass-walled office), and they both look forward to such neo-Rousseau-ish dreams as "touching Indians." For starters, they're off in their new mobile home, a thirty-foot Winnebago, to Las Vegas to remarry each other at the Silver Bell Chapel; then, supported by their $145,000 nest egg obtained from liquidating their possessions, they will realize David's fantasy of living out--with the minor improvements money can buy--his favorite movie, Easy Rider.

But of course, the Howards are no Easy Riders: A real biker to whom David tenders a thumbs-up salute responds by giving him the finger. And when, at nightfall, they reach the seedy Silver Bell, Linda first wants a honeymoon night at the Desert Inn, complete with a gargantuan double bed in which to eat, watch porno movies on TV, and have sex; then let the new and simpler life begin. David, who depends on Linda as much as she on him for what she has once called a too "controlled," too "responsible" life, reluctantly agrees. At the Desert Inn, disaster first trickles, then hurtles, in. A heavily bribed desk clerk delivers only a "junior bridal suite" with no huge expanse of double bed, merely a pair of heart-shaped twisn and a not quite heart-shaped gap between. Soon David is in the hole, for Linda, unbeknown to him, has sneaked out to gamble away their nest egg in a trancelike furty such as only a long-repressed model working wife could muster up. The nest egg is down to $805--not enough shelter to keep the rain off an inchworm.

Although this infantile, atavistic, destructive self-assertion of Linda's is comic enough and makes primitive sense, it is also the first, and perhaps biggest, blow against the film's artistic integrity. To make valid satirical fun of the Howards and the society they suffocate in, Lost in America should have made their downfall--or the unviableness of their scheme--hinge on something less capricious, less facilely instantaneous. The nest egg should dwindle away in spite of their best intentions; its evaporation should tell much more about them (us) and their (our) world than that Linda had a rather unprepossessing flaw. Comic comeuppance is like coffee: the percolating kind tastes truer than the instant variety.

Still, the film bounces toward its predictable conclusion merrily enough. But just think what could have been done--assuming that money for such a conclusion could have been raised--with an unforegone one. Yet even the present ending could have been arrived at more deviously, more compellingly, less prefabricatedly. There is also something wrong with the very structure and timing of the film: It is too short, and leaps from a rising (or falling) action to a denouement, skipping the needed climax. Even so, it scores in three distinct ways.

First, there are clusters of funny lines in this script by Brooks and Monica Johnson, as when David, no longer able to repress his slow burn at Linda's breaking the nest egg if not the bank, erupt into a conjugal lecture-philippic that forbids her the very use of the term "nest egg" and even its components: Were they to drive through woods, a bird, for her, should be "living in a round stick," and they should be having "things over easy for lunch."

Second, there is perfect acting. Brooks has a way of turning manic without becoming over-ridiculous: He stresses the pre- or post-preposterous rather than the merely laugh-getting, as his namesake Mel usually does. Even his looks are neatly balanced between the wholesomely straightforward and the faintly ludicrous--a mite too pudgy, frizzy-haired, beady-eyed. And Julie Hagerty, attractive, sublime in her injured dignity, able to coalesce her wispiness in a twinkling into something sheerly demonic, is also (aptly) too sleek, breathy, and insubstantial, with a touch of Lehmbruckian elongation. The supporting cast is inspiredly chosen from little-known actors; thus the Desert Inn Casino pit boss is played by Garry Marshall, the TV and movie director, with a textured subtlety that does credit both to him and to Brooks, who directed him here. All the players in an almost uninterruptedly hilarious string of vignettes act with something like a rich, untapped vein of comic idiosyncrasy.

Lastly, the film has a visual imagination rare for comedies in this age of television-influenced moviemaking. The gags are always situated within a setting, and often enough the inappropriate or disproportionate setting is the gag. At other times, with the help of his cinematographer, Eric Saarinen, Brooks achieves pungent visual effects, as when David's beige Winnebago chases after the red coupe in which the angry Linda has hitched a ride. The road winds around a hillside and we see, in extreme long shot, two miniaturized vehicles zigzagging athwart the screen in seemingly opposite directions. Even this shot, at first only beautiful, has comic reverberations.

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