Albert Brooks' 1991 "Defending Your Life"

As I've grown, so has my adoration of this film, which is more tormented than you'd guess from the cheery surface. Albert Brooks — droll, slow, witty, acerbic as all hell — is our finest American comedian, up there with Elaine May. (Hot take: Brooks is the genius everybody claims the middling Woody Allen to be, but isn’t.) Brooks’s most optimistic film, his unabashed romcom Defending Your Life, was impossibly a minor box-office bomb when it came out. Time has been kind to it, of course. It has found its audience.

Brooks is an advertising executive in the picture. He opens the film celebrating his birthday alone, listening to “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story on his car stereo, when he gets hit by a bus — the first of many of Brooks’s hilarious, droll little ironic jokes. We go from L.A. to a purgatorial “Judgment City” — which, hmm, still feels like L.A. But the corporate version of L.A. Crippling loneliness. People stay in Judgment City for 5 days as they defend their life to determine whether they will go to heaven or … well, the other place here is just Earth. Brooks’ generous imagination of an afterlife means one can ascend, or one will simply come back down to square one, reincarnate, and keep trying to transcend their biggest hangups, their fears, the things that keep them from being who they can be at their fullest. So, really, it’s Judgment City here that is heaven (though it really resembles L.A., a famously shitty heaven), and Earth is purgatory. Heaven itself? Something beyond our comprehension — for of course we only use a small part of our brains.

To close with a personal memory, Defending Your Life — which is, alongside A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and Diane Keaton’s Heaven (1987) as one of the essential films on the afterlife — is now permanently linked to my first full, earnest week in New York City on a research trip for an art-history professor—a trip that convinced me to live in the city for the long term. I stayed in an AirBNB in Queens for two weeks with this amazing couple, Ana and Hugo, passionate cinephiles who ran a Latin-American arts weekly out in Astoria and who generously gave me recommendations and copies of films to see from Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina (which I'm still making my way through). I turned 22 my second day with them; that afternoon, they bought me dulce de leche cake and we sat in their backporch talking about Roberto Gavaldón as the sun melded into a miserably humid night in August. As an exchange, I remember wandering down to the Housing Works Bookshop in SoHo on about my fourth day in the city, where I spotted two DVD copies of Defending Your Life in the bargain bin, bought them on the spot, and gave one of the copies to Ana y Hugo to watch and keep. The next day over morning coffee, Hugo said to me (in Spanish): "Oh my God. Wow. What a punch that gave us. But how could someone your age know about it! And get it! It must be like science fiction for you, at 22." About two weeks after that, I was on a plane from L.A. back to the city.