Lost in America (1985): some kind of comic masterpiece (Review)

Introducing himself to various people on a road trip across America, David Howard explains his project as follows: “We’ve dropped out of society”. Yet the first stop he and his wife Linda make on their journey is Las Vegas, a town whose inhabitants live, as the Joker so sagely informs us, in a society. David and Linda’s camper-van odyssey never gets them so much as an inch off the beaten track, but it’s this unbroken string of failure and thwarted ambition that makes Lost in America – issued on Blu-Ray by Criterion UK – such a richly funny film.

David is played by Lost in America‘s writer and director Albert Brooks, whose directorial work has a strong cult following but who is perhaps best known outside that fanbase for his string of unforgettable guest appearances on The Simpsons. Hank Scorpio, the Bond villain who became Homer’s dream boss, might be the most famous one, but if you’re looking for an Albert Brooks Simpsons episode that makes for an uncannily good supporting short for this film, head straight for Season One’s ‘The Call of the Simpsons’, where Brooks plays a slick RV salesman. The satirical target of these scenes – the mobile home as transport of choice for people who want to brag about venturing into the wild while bringing all of their home comforts with them – is exactly the same as Lost in America‘s. David is an advertising executive, and Brooks has him dreaming of perfectly observed Madison Avenue cliches like having sex on Linda’s work desk, or “touching Indians”. Heading out from LA into the American heartland, the first thing that really sends him into a spiritual rapture is how good the grilled cheese sandwiches from his camper-van’s toaster taste.

Reviews of Lost in America usually describe David and Linda as yuppies, and while that’s not exactly wrong they’re very different from the kind of rapacious, predatory yuppies Oliver Stone would soon immortalise in Wall Street. They’re just two ordinary people who’ve ended up with good jobs, but still have some lingering sense from their 1960s youth that they’re meant to do something more meaningful with their lives. David’s model for his journey is Easy Rider, though as Linda notes the lead characters of that movie were cocaine dealers, which means they had a more concrete business plan to fund their road trip than the Howards do. Linda is played by Julie Hagerty, whose iconic screen debut in Airplane! saw her channelling her strangely melancholy voice into ironic melodrama. Lost in America is just as much of a showcase for her magnificent comedy timing as Airplane! was, but there is also a core of real, serious sadness to the character, most obviously in her gambling addiction.

Test audiences found Linda gambling away the family’s savings a little too reckless even for a film whose hero describes himself as “insane and responsible – this is a potent combination!” Rather than cut the subplot, Brooks simply upped the pushback Linda got from David. The resulting fits of temper qualify as some of the movie’s funniest scenes, and also left a big impression on Nicolas Winding Refn, who decided to cast Brooks as the psychotic mafia boss Bernie Rose in Drive after watching him rant at Hagerty. Above all else, Lost in America reveals Brooks the director as having a world-class talent for balancing a movie’s mood. He sometimes refuses to tell bit-part players they’re in a comedy – “I don’t even tell them they’re in a film“, he quips in the disc’s extras – for fear of getting overly wacky, farcical turns. The humour instead comes from the situation and the characters’ desperation, creating a whole that is much funnier than any individual scene or performance.

It’s a philosophy that works. Lost in America stands today as a perfect time-capsule of baby-boomer values in mid-80s America; it also has a timeless feel and a universal resonance. The two should cancel each other out, but this is some kind of comic masterpiece and the normal rules of cinematic physics no longer apply. Criterion have made the wise decision to let Brooks and his colleagues talk about the film on the extras, rather than bring outside critics or experts in. There’s a very sweet interview with Hagerty, an interesting talk with Brooks’s friend and Simpsons producer James L Brooks and a great half-hour conversation between Brooks and Curb Your Enthusiasm director Robert E Weide, during which Weide unearths an Easter egg in the film that Brooks claims nobody has ever spotted before.

Thanks for reading Graham’s review of Lost in America

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