Defending Your Life

The film that will change your life... FOREVER!

A fellow buys a BMW, tools down Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, turns south around Frank's Nursery and smacks into a bus. Now he's in Judgment City, where he's put on trial like a common saint, and found wanting. Yet, at the last moment, his spirited pursuit of a lovely soul (Meryl Streep) earns him his, uh, wings.

Judgment City is essentially hotels and civic architecture (or corporate spaces, as they're called). It's like Vegas or Laughlin, maybe, it's announced on billboards as you're taken there. You can review your past lives in a sort of Disney "haunted house" of booths (introduced by Shirley MacLaine). An old man sees himself, incredulously, as a little Victorian girl combing her dolly's hair. An old woman is terrified by the apparition of a sumo wrestler she was, once. Our hero was an African tribesman chased by a lion. Streep was Prince Valiant.

Brooks plays an essential character of the workaday world, a fellow whose worldly ambitions are small and fleeting and more like expectations than anything else. There isn't enough of him, really, to justify eternal life.

The casting is one exquisite calculation among many (truly, it took an Einstein to make this film). Lee Grant is the prosecutor or advocatus diaboli, and her counterpart (the advocatus dei) is Rip Torn. Streep lends a very humorous presence belying the celestial impermeability of her fame. Buck Henry is brought on, briefly, to secure the note.

Cocteau, of course, conceived the afterlife in terms of Postwar France. How telling is an American conception founded on the corporate vagary of our public lives? America saw this and started driving tougher cars. Vegas got a makeover, likewise.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002