The Reel World

Candid Cameras: Real Life on Film

April 16?May 8

Museum of the Moving Image

The most hilarious comedy, the most gripping drama, the most suspenseful disasters-they don't happen on the movie screen, they happen in my backyard and yours!"

So says Albert Brooks in his 1979 film Real Life, which is being screened as part of a surveillance-themed series at the Museum of the Moving Image April 16?May 8. Titled "Candid Cameras: Real Life on Film," the series jumps around through the decades, highlighting the ironies and contradictions that occur when documentary apes drama, and vice-versa. It starts in the 70s with excerpts from Alan and Susan Raymond's groundbreaking 1973 PBS series An American Family (April 16, 2 p.m.), which observed the real-life Loud family (including Lance Loud, who shocked post-Stonewall middle America by coming out of the closet on tv) via hidden cameras installed in their home. Then it moves on to Brooks' movie (April 16, 4:30 p.m.), a satire that announces its inspiration by quoting Margaret Mead's praise for An American Family in its introductory crawl. "It is, I believe, as new and as significant as the invention of drama or the novel," Mead said of the PBS series, "?a new way in which people can learn to look at life, by seeing the real life of others interpreted by the camera."

Real Life exercises a comedian's prerogative by daring to hammer on a central conundrum ducked by most documentaries, An American Family included: No matter how unobtrusive a filmmaker tries to be, his subject is still likely to react to the cameras by subtly altering his behavior, thereby making existence into a kind of performance, infusing life with fiction's DNA and creating a hybrid monster that's at once real and unreal.

In Real Life, an ambitious young filmmaker (Brooks, playing "himself") goes to Phoenix and dogs the middle-class Yeager family (headed by Charles Grodin and Lee McCain) with documentary crews and hidden cameras. Brooks hopes to record mundane truths that elude Hollywood, but his academic bromides were never heartfelt (an introductory press conference in Phoenix ends with Brooks crooning "Something's Gotta Give" while backed by Merv Griffin's orchestra). As the experiment unreels, delivering muted footage of middle-class domestic angst rather than conventional movie thrills, we're appalled but not surprised when the director tries to liven things up by showing up unannounced in a clown suit, proposing a family trip to a day spa and plotting to seduce Mrs. Yeager.

One of the most neglected great comedies of the 70s, Real Life is a mother lode of culturally clairvoyant bits. (Showing off his production team's state-of-the-art camera-helmets, he brags, "All picture and sound information is recorded digitally on these integrated circuit chips, some no larger than a child's fingernail.") But Real Life doesn't just anticipate so-called reality shows (first predicted by 1976's Network) and the technology that would be used to produce them; it investigates the tangled assumptions behind documentary cinema itself.

Brooks' biting screenplay, cowritten with Monica Johnson and Harry Shearer, sees through the academic pretense of An American Family, which was ultimately less a record of events that might have happened anyway than a filmed experiment whose real (if unstated) subject was the psychological strain inflicted by surveillance. Teasing that theme, Brooks' director/narrator keeps up the pretense that he's just watching the Yeagers go about their business, yet they're aware of being filmed every second; that awareness infects their consciousness, turning them into self-obsessed worrywarts like Brooks. "Could you please stop talking about the movie for just one minute?" Mrs. Yeager asks Mr. Yeager during her grandmother's funeral.

Brooks' satire points the way toward the likes of MTV's The Real World (the subject of a May 7 panel discussion), which was essentially An American Family with younger, hotter subjects and zero shame. Yet even The Real World avoided acknowledging its own central contrivance: Every season, one or more participants decided they'd had enough and disappeared from the show, prompting housemates to disingenuously wonder where they'd gone.

This series' masterstroke-expressed through other titles on the schedule-is its recognition that the tension between life and drama is nothing new; that in fact, it is the essential fuel of cinema. Robert Flaherty's influential 1922 documentary Nanook of the North (April 22, 2 p.m.) was praised for recording Inuit traditions that were on the verge of vanishing even then. Yet we now know that Flaherty wasn't more pure than Brooks' character, only more serious; he wasn't merely going on location and photographing what he saw, but recreating situations described in books, personal testimonies and his own notebooks.

Similarly, D.A. Pennebaker's great Bob Dylan film Don't Look Back (April 23, 2 p.m.) is considered a verite classic, but can the sarcastic, hectoring shaman-folkie onscreen be considered the "real" Dylan? If not, should we be alarmed or amused?

Unanswerable questions, but Brooks prods us to ask them by refusing to take the documentarian's vow of non-interference (the equivalent of Star Trek's Prime Directive) at face value. He suggests instead that reportage and drama are kissing cousins, and that ultimately, even the most outwardly circumspect nonfiction reveals less about the tale than the teller: his presumptions, his preoccupations, his vanity.

"It's undeniable that you've strongly altered the reality you're filming," a researcher warns Brooks mere weeks into the experiment. "In my opinion you're getting a false reality here, and I don't know what you're going to do about it." Brooks processes this for a moment, looking deeply troubled, then turns to another researcher and says: "You said I looked heavier now than when filming started. Where would that be, in the cheeks?"

Fever Pitch

Directed by Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly

The Farrelly Brothers' Fever Pitch is their gentlest movie-so gentle that it's bound to disappoint fans of Kingpin, Dumb and Dumber and other earlier, nastier works-and like most Farrelly movies, it's unimaginatively photographed and about 20 minutes too long. But this love story about a white-collar numbers cruncher (Drew Barrymore) who falls for a hapless Red Sox fanatic still charms, thanks to unaffectedly emotional lead performances (Fallon reminded me of Ewan McGregor in Big Fish) and a willingness to anchor comic absurdity to recognizable emotion. It's about how lovers must learn to meet one another halfway-even accept one another's seemingly irrational obsessions-in order to find something like happiness. "You're being colonized!" the heroine's friend warns her, after she starts attending games regularly. But our hero, who hasn't missed a home game since age seven and doesn't mind the Sox's longtime World Series losing streak, dares to speak sentimental truth in a cynical time: "It's good for your soul to invest in something you can't control." The film's tacked-on happy ending-dictated by the unexpected reverse of the Red Sox curse-mutes its message of love no matter what. But it's still a sweet movie.