I like Albert Brooks. I like most of his movies. Sure, he was in Taxi Driver and offers his voice as Marlin in Finding Nemo (we do not speak of Finding Dory), but he has written, directed, and starred in about five or six of his own movies. One of them is Defending Your Life.
It’s a simple film–a guy gets killed by a bus and meets every other new dead person in a sort of limbo where they must “defend” their lives in order to move up to the good place. It’s courtroom comedy featuring clips of his life and how he has to justify that he is ready as an individual to take the next step, or get sent back to Earth in another person’s body.
This becomes the issue in many a courtroom piece. I like Camus’s The Stranger because the trial has nothing to do with the killing of an Arab; instead, the jury focuses on the character of Meursault. Why is he so distant? Why does he do the things he does? And why don’t they make sense to us, since we all have a majority opinion? It’s about the person, not the issue.
Everyone’s your buddy, your pal. There’s playful banter between all, until the trial starts.
I just watched an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary on John Calipari’s success as a coach. Same deal. Everyone welcomed him to UMass for his first coaching job. Why shouldn’t they? The team won two games the previous year, neither against Division One opponents. Everyone was so nice and applauded the job he was doing with those kids. Because they were LOSING.
That’s the problem with success, though. People don’t like it when it’s happening to someone else. They don’t like a changing of the guard. They don’t like watching someone else become successful with a program filled with students/players that could not find success elsewhere. Rather than applauding the success, they look for reasons, no matter how ludicrous or irrelevant, to find fault in what other people are doing.
I get it. I do. You’ll get the truth out of me, whether it fits your ideals, or not. But no matter what people say about me, or the person I have team-taught with for the last 15 years, we know the deal. We have merely tried to teach our students everything, all the while instilling a sense of self-worth and community (among other things) for everyone involved.
You’d think that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s why Albert Brooks isn’t popular (except as a fish).