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5 In Albert Brooks’s comedy The Muse (1999), a Hollywood screenwriter (played by Brooks) attempts to reignite his stalled career by employing the services of a muse (Sharon Stone). Descended from one of the nine Muses of Greek myth, she boasts an impressive track record of divinely inspired careers—at one point she and Brooks bump into Rob Reiner, who exclaims, “Thank you for The American President.” Expensive, demanding, and capricious, the muse rapidly takes over the screenwriter’s life, requiring lavish treatment and eventually moving in with Brooks and his wife (Andie MacDowell). Co-written by Brooks and Monica Johnson, this satire of Hollywood is embellished with sharp, frequently hilarious observation of its ritual humiliations and shallow social and professional interactions, with notable contributions from Jeff Bridges as a self-absorbed Oscar-winning screenwriter friend, Steven Wright as Stan Spielberg (“I’m Steven’s cousin”), and Martin Scorsese in a self-parodying cameo. But at its core is the spectacle of a rational, down-to-earth individual who, faced with a career crisis that threatens the life of comfortable domestic affluence he has built for himself, succumbs with surprisingly few misgivings to an absurd New Age fix and gets more than he bargained for. At heart The Muse is less a broadside against the industry than another of Brooks’s subtly offbeat cautionary comedies of modern anxiety. Once again, a Me Generation everyman occupies an ideal lifestyle or system, blissfully unaware of its underlying precariousness. Whether it be the callow filmmaker’s perfect experiment in documentary in Real Life (1979); the impossible fantasy of “true love” in Modern Romance (1981); the way a life of complacent materialism is exchanged for an equally deluded freedom of the road in the anti-Reagan-zeitgeist Lost in America (1985), INTERVIEW BY GAVIN SMITH ALBERT BROOKS ME GENERATION EVERYMAN McGilligan_Ch01 8/7/09 11:36 AM Page 5 or ended altogether by the ultimate bummer of sudden death at the start of Defending Your Life (1991), the Brooks protagonist is oblivious until too late. In The Muse, as in Mother (1996) and Lost in America, the great central comic conceit is the adoption of an improbable radical solution: when your marriage fails, move back in with your mother to figure out why your relationships with women don’t work; when you don’t get the promotion you feel you deserve, quit, drop out of society, and go on the road to find yourself; if your writing career goes south, hire a muse and do whatever she instructs, even if you can’t shake the feeling that you’re being shortchanged. Brooks’s protagonists tend to be successful yet average creative types who write or work in advertising or filmmaking (one of the incidental joys of Modern Romance is its dead accurate depiction of a film editor’s working life). His characterizations effectively refract the contradictions, compromises, and neuroses of the Baby Boomer generation with its overdeveloped sense of entitlement and unapologetic materialism: narcissistic and controlling yet insecure and resigned, reflexively self-analytical yet lacking emotional self-honesty. It’s hard to think of another American filmmaker who has dedicated himself or herself so completely to scrutinizing the foibles of his generational peers without becoming moralistic or sentimental. Starting with his early-1970s bits for TV, his two unique records, Comedy Minus One (1973) and A Star Is Bought (1976), and his six short films for Saturday Night Live in 1975–76, his comic persona is smugly self-confident yet oblivious to his own absurdity. A number of his performances for other directors (starting out for Scorsese in Taxi Driver but notably in James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News and I’ll Do Anything) feed on the same persona, combining humbling misfortune with an ensuing struggle to overcome pervasive anxiety and regain existential terra firma. But perhaps because of his sparse output as a feature director—seven films in twenty-five years—even some of Brooks’s critical champions have called him an underachiever. I know what they mean. Brooks seems constitutionally incapable of going over the top in his performances and films, and he’s not interested in blowing the audience away. In his elusive sui generis brand of antisentimental, observational comedy, the comic possibilities of character and situation are always restrained by a defining sense of plausible reality and authentic, self-revealing emotional experience. This places him completely at odds with American comedy’s currently prevailing aesthetic—a parodic, cartoonish absurdism...

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