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...The joke running through Defending Your Life is that the next world isn't much different from this world: It's just more of the same, without hassle...

...But no, the moment passes and we have to settle for a couple of conventional love scenes...

...Brooks's acting is not just something he does in addition to writing and directing...

...Subduing the imp in himself, Brooks fails to instill it in anybody else...

...Brooks's relentless nervousness can no longer drive this action because often he is just an observer, especially in the trial scenes which are dominated by the wrangling attorneys...

...Chris, who is too wimpy to be as genuinely self-absorbed as Lt...

...Pinkerton, suffers over the loss of Kim and then, apparently as an act of therapy, marries Ellen, the requisite American blonde needed for contrast on the return to the East...

...By this odd criterion, Hitler must be in seventh heaven and Hamlet's soul would be thrown away after one quick inspection...

...This movie differs from Brooks's previous films in that the humor isn't rooted in his personality but in the basic situation (an adman is killed in an accident and arrives at a sort of celestial way station where he must justify his life in court before he can go on to a higher existence), the setting (Judgment City is nothing but a cozy composite of several sunbelt villages), and the bafflements inherent in any comedy about afterlife (how do you tip an otherworldly bellhop when there is no money in the Great Beyond...

...No one could play the demon neurotics Brooks writes as well as Brooks himself...

...The only real political content in the musical lies with the Engineer, the pimp-hustler played with a fine abrasiveness by Jonathan Pryce...

...An ascetical lesson then of Percy, of Catholicism, of monasticism, and of New Orleans is that the presence of death gives life new vibrancy...

...In Brooks's celestial court, pusillanimity seems to be the worst possible sin...

...This remarkable writer, with his unblinking and severe assessment of human beings, sees hope and salvation in their finitude...

...Likewise, that boisterous place, where the dead are trumpeted to their graves, is a city of life because it is a city of death...

...Unfortunately, it functions in this movie as a liability...

...It is an ascetic choice, a drawing apart...

...The music consists primarily of romantic songs performed by Kim (Lea Salonga in fine voice) and Chris (Willy Falk, who seemed a bit nasal to me), together or alone, and by Ellen (Liz Callaway...

...There is little real sense that this is the Vietnam that left so deep a wound on America...

...His acting in his own movies is the culmination of his writing and the most important tool of his directing...

...It is alive in a way unmatched by superior, Emersonian New England or my native California, with its vineyards and Disneylands...

...We get instead humdrum episodes observed by the court in silence...

...But, in Defending, with Brooks more subdued than usual, the other characters must pull more comic freight...

...She dies prettily in Chris's arms while the other principals stand around looking properly shocked, except for the phlegmatic child who, if this were real life instead of stage life, would probably flip out at fourteen and kill his American parents...

...There is something holy, something profound there, beneath the bon vivance, and I would love to be in that number, when those saints rise up and begin to march...

...A photograph in the program suggests that an image of mixed-race Vietnamese children brought the composer and the librettist to the story, but that aspect of the work---despite or because of a filmed sequence of such children--seems purely exploitative here...

...Rip Tom does the best work...

...Brooks's inventions are excellent: the soap operas on the hotel TV in which characters must revile each other not only for their past deeds but their past lives...

...In the first third of Defending Your Life, as adman Daniel Miller gets used to the idea of being dead and starts to enjoy himself, everything on screen charms the viewer...

...His jumpiness makes the other characters jump or else sit back in staring bewilderment at this one-man collection of urban tics and choked-back desires...

...It's little more than a pile of dirt in the woods, marked only by a small bronze plate with name and dates...

...the weather stations that can only endlessly relay the news that it's seventy-four degrees and clear all day, every day...

...They meet, fall in love, sing about being in love at great length, and are parted by circumstances--i.e., the last of the Americans getring the hell out of Saigon by helicopter (celebrated stage business) just before the city falls...

...I cannot imagine that my still, small voice of doubt has any resonance amid the hoopla...

...As this paragon, Meryl Streep continues her quest for comedy roles that will complement her triumphs in drama...

...The lawyer reveals that, on the universal scale of intelligence, earthly humans only rate as "little brains": "But if you could use more than 5 percent of your brains, you wouldn't want to be on earth...

...Kim survives by hook or unexplained crook and, true love being truer in Vietnam, remains convinced that Chris will come back for her and for the son he does not know he has...

...the Past Life Pavilion, hosted by--Shirley MacLaine...

...Evagrius Ponticus's fourth-century treatise, Rerum monachalium rationes, insists that a monk think on the moment he will die every day of his life: Sitting in your cell, Collect your thoughts, Remember the day of your death...

...the restaurants where huge, magically nonfattening portions are literally forced on the guests...

...17 May 1991:323 But the dialogue in the trial scenes is so lifeless that Torn starts to labor visibly, the way all good actors do when they are asked to supply the wit that their scripts lack...

...There at St...

...Lee Grant as the prosecutor endows her role with customary sleekness and no-nonsense intensity...

...And the aggressions he perpetrates on his fellow actors are the lashes that make the crew row...

...They might have been redeemed if Daniel, his lawyer (Rip Tom), and the prosecutor (Lee Grant) had provided a running, wisecracking commentary...

...SCREEN HEAVEN WITHOUT HASSLES BROOKS'S 'DEFENDING YOUR LIFE' atching Albert Brooks on screen is like watching a man have a creative, selfdelighting anxiety attack...

...But in Defending Your Life, the taskmaster has turned into a genial host...

...Brooks obviously realized that this wasn't enough to make the audience strain for the hero to win his case...

...Miss Saigon is the story of a doomed love affair between Chris, an American marine who belatedly comes to see the ugly pointlessness of the raunchy life he has been living, and Kim, a Vietnamese village girl who belatedly comes to sell and save herself in the sleazy last days of the Saigon bar scene...

...Daniel learns that denial to a higher existence means only a return to earth for another chance to live decisively...

...Implicit--and explicit in some of Chris's lyrics--is the idea that the Americans, coming to do good do only evil (ask the Kurds about that), but it is not the central subject of the piece...

...His whines and incredulous smiles are the orchestral accompaniment for his dialogue...

...Most of them aren't up to the job...

...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE NOTHING TO SING ABOUT 'MISS SAIGON' HITS BROADWAY lie man sitting behind me at Miss Saigon greeted each musical number with sharp, exclamatory bursts of applause and the curtain calls of the principals with deep intakes of breath...

...and the musical has been such a triumph in London that Miss Saigon has become the biggest presold hit in the history of Broadway...

...I expect to see one of those kids turning up shortly on T-shirts like the starving child now known as Les Miz...

...Fueled by greed, he acts on the assumption that the whole world shares his view of human behavior, and his goal is to reach America, which he sees as his natural home and which he celebrates in "The American Dreams," a song about a materialistic heaven ("The Movie in My Mind," as one of the other songs is called) in which the most arresting image shows him having sex with a limo...

...His glib lawyer is both amusing and unsettling because his agreeableness seems to mask his knowledge of what is in store for his client...

...Finally, however, all the ugly aspects of the time and the place are subsumed in the timeless, placeless love story...

...And this woman is so obviously headed for a higher existence that Daniel's return to earth would part the lovers forever...

...When he isn't dealing with the mundane hitches of ordinary life, he goes limp...

...But Albert Brooks is the lyric poet of hassle...

...Watching Streep toss her tresses and do from-thegut, life-embracing laughs to flesh out what is no more than a notion of the scriptwriters is like watching an athlete do graceful side-bends and leg-stretches and then retire to the showers without ever getting on the field...

...So he invented a heroine, also on trial, with whom Daniel can fall in love...

...As I look at this grave, for me death comes closer, is less abstract, more real...

...At one point, Brooks starts to become envious of the way Streep's judges are fawning over the perfection of her life, and our hopes are raised that Brooks, torn between love and jealousy, will take us on one of his masterly jags of comic self-destruction...

...This is a brave departure for such a domineering performer...

...I am sure there is a final lesson in his decision to lie among the monks...

...Perhaps I was overcome by the situation, but the songs all sounded a lot alike to me, and some of Richard Maltby, Jr.'s American words were about as dumb as lyrics get: Ellen, 324: Commonweal...

...The veterinary in Real Life, the casino manager and the employment counselor in the brilliant Lost in America (one of the two or three best comedies of the eighties), all revealed unexpected, buggy facets as they reacted to the aggressions of the Brooks persona...

...Like Les Misdrables, the other Alan Boublil-Claude-Michel Schonberg megahit, Miss Saigon is going to be around for years, in New York and on the road, and is presumably going to bring joyful tears to a great many people...

...There was so much willit-or-won't-it-open publicity about the producer's difficulties in getting Equity approval for the leads he wanted (was there ever doubt in anyone's mind...

...I am somewhat surprised that Percy did not choose to lay his body down among those other, more worldly mortals, as a final act of solidarity with the humanity he spent his life puzzling over and describing...

...Cinematographer Allen Daviau gives the movie a spaciousness that well suits the spirit of instant gratification of a New Age paradise...

...Joseph's you are far from the formal, above-ground vaults where the dead of New Orleans lie ringing their city...

...I assume that his reactions were true aesthetic/emotional responses, but, having a suspicious nature, I wondered if perhaps both his and the general enthusiasm were not a product of the occasion rather than the work itself...

...I found Percy's grave a few thousand feet out into the woods from the Benedictine refectory with its vivid frescos...

...But this is stage life...

...The child actor gets tossed around like a beanbag and should be in bed long before the final curtain...

...The fast-talking, covertly needling control-freak that Brooks plays to perfection, both in his own films (Real Life, Lost in America) and those directed by others (Taxi Driver, Broadcast News), sets the pace of each scene he's in...

...The gleam in his puckered, Nelson Rockefeller eyes is mysteriously eloquent and, for the pretrial scenes, Brooks gives Torn some good lines...

...But when the main action begins, Daniel's defense of his life before two judges, the movie goes flat fast...

...But her work here is monochromatic...

...A small anthill has formed at a point right above Percy's heart...

...Episodes of Daniel's earthly existence are shown on a movie screen in court, but these scenes are written and directed without flair...

...In his previous work, Brooks brought out the oddity of seemingly "normal," faceless people...

...Her quest will have to persist...

...The early monks haunted the cemeteries, as if to show that they had died to this world...

...At the end, wanting to save her son even at her own expense (in act 1 she sang about dying for the boy), Kim shoots herself and thus sets up one of the most preposterous final tableaux I can remember having seen on stage...