| Warner Bros. - The Geffen Company, 1985 | Runtime: 91 minutes | Rated R |
| Starring Albert Brooks, Julie Hagerty, Garry Marshall, Tom Tarpey, Michael Greene, Donald Gibb | ||
| Written by Albert Brooks and Monica Johnson | Directed by Albert Brooks | |
"My legs are asleep. Let's live here."
This verbatim quote expresses the general aimlessness of the main characters
in Albert Brooks' "Lost in America" (1985). The film's hero is David Howard
(Brooks) who wants to base his life on the 1969 classic "Easy Rider." He
wants to hit the road with no destination whatsoever, just to find himself.
His partner throughout his journey--the Dennis Hopper to his Peter Fonda if
you will--is his wife Linda (Julie Hagerty). Together they embark on an
endless road to simplicity, happiness, and self-discovery. Or so they think.
David is a Southern California yuppie who, for the last eight years of his
life, has been working for Ross-McMahon, one of the biggest advertising
agencies in the world, though no one seems to have heard of it. His wife is
also a slave to the 9-to-5 world, working in a department store for the last
seven years of her life. However, they believe their lives are about to
change. They are about to move into a new home and David is confident that
his boss will promote him to Senior Vice President of Ross-McMahon.
The boss has different plans. He wants to transfer David to New York to work
creatively under the baldheaded east-coast boss, Brad. As he is told of this
information, David's face turns from expected pleasure to stunned disbelief.
He's been waiting his whole life to become Senior Vice President and he's
convinced that all he's been given is a transfer to another account. David
throws a fit and ultimately gets himself fired. He exits the building
screaming about his boss, "Don't have lunch with this man! He'll tell you
all about the future. I've seen the future. It's a baldheaded man from New
York!"
David is on such a high of irresponsibility that he rushes into his wife's
office begging her to quit her job. He believes his life is saved. He now
wants to get out of Southern California to find himself. Through a series of
addition, subtraction, and estimation, he figures out a way that they can buy
a motor home and drive away with $145,000 in cash stored in a "nestegg" as
David so memorably refers to it. They have only one stop on their life-long
quest: Las Vegas, Nevada. They want to get remarried first and then set out
to roam around the United States for the rest of their lives. They stay
overnight at the Desert Inn Hotel & Casino and plan to get married at the
crack of dawn.
David wakes up at dawn, but he can't find Linda. He finally wanders
downstairs to the roulette table to find Linda rooting psychotically for the
number 22. David is able to pull her away from the table long enough for her
to inform him that she gambled away the nestegg. The whole thing. Well,
except for $802 ("That's something, isn't it?"). David's plan and
consequently his life are ruined. In one of the film's most famous scenes,
he explains to Linda the importance of the nestegg and gets so angry at her
that he forbids her to use the word. "And don't use any part of it either,"
he adds. "Don't use 'nest,' don't use 'egg.' If you're in the forest, you
point, the bird lives in a *round stick*, and you have *things* over easy
with toast!"
"Lost in America" is a film in which funny scenes are consistently piled on
top of one another. One laugh comes after another. There's the scene where
David tries to persuade the Casino manager (Garry Marshall) to give them back
their nestegg. And then there's the scene at the Hoover Dam where David
finally explodes in anger and, as a result, Linda hitches a ride with an
escaped convict. And then the scene where Linda gets David out of a speeding
ticket because of a common interest between David and the officer. And then
the scene at the unemployment office. And then David's first day at his new
job. And of course the brilliant final scene in which David, in an odd way,
really finds himself.
This is rightfully held up as one of the funniest movies there is. It is a
delightful marriage of the road-trip comedy and the torture-of-9-to-5-life
comedy, and ends up being the absolute best of both worlds. The opening
credits of the film have a Larry King radio show playing in the background.
He mentions that Mel Brooks once told him that a comedy film always needs an
audience. Believe me, you won't need forty other people in the room laughing
to remind you that you should be laughing at something in "Lost in America."
It's funny. You'll laugh.
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