Albert Brooks back behind the camera (as well as in front of it) after his customary several-year hiatus. His faithful fans can hardly begrudge him the shrewd publicity move of casting in the title role a former Hollywood leading lady long out of the limelight. It didn't have to be Debbie Reynolds (names ranging from Doris Day to Nancy Reagan were bandied about in the press), but our surprise in the result could not have been greater. Reorchestrating this actress from a blaring brass instrument into a mellow woodwind (that creamy, reasonable, pleading tone; that smooth, flat, New Englandish glide at the ends of sentences) is surely as masterful a job of directing as it is of acting. On the other hand, it is possible to notice -- to sense -- to suspect -- an increased desire for the audience to identify and sympathize with the Brooks protagonist (on such points of contention, say, as his mother's pathological thriftiness or her uncertain grasp of his vegetarianism: "Can you eat lamb chops?"), and an increased willingness to reward the audience with a conventional Happy Ending, however far-fetched and facetious. And -- to sum up any reservations in the most shorthand way -- this is the first of Brooks's movies that might easily be imagined as a TV sitcom: the twice-divorced middle-aged man moving back home with his widowed mother in hopes of understanding his relations with the opposite sex. Of course Brooks neatly resolves the situation in barely ninety minutes, though not without sitcommy moralizing: "For the very first time I don't see you as my mother. I see you as a failure." And it could also be fairly argued that the movie is more "interesting" than eruptively funny. From that angle, one of the more interesting things about it is the recurring theme of people not "getting" other people's jokes, especially Brooks's own (first his designated-driver buddy, then an airheaded first date, then his mama's-boy younger brother, then a gas-station attendant, then -- and more than once -- his mother, then a store clerk, then a nosy neighbor). Is Brooks trying to tell us something? Or is he telling us something without trying? (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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