To paraphrase Bugs Bunny, maybe we all took a wrong turn at the Coachella Valley. What else could explain the death-grip the Reagan era has on pop culture and pop music? I enjoy having all those tinny Casios back, and even though I suffered through the "I, Assassin" tour, I might even pony up to see Gary Numan if he comes to America, just for old times' sake. But when Depeche Mode gets to headline, maybe this 1980s nostalgia death trip needs to end. And yet, there is one figure of 1980s culture who is getting a deserved comeback, despite the critical and box-office lambasting of his recent Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World: Just released on DVD, Modern Romance, a vintage Albert Brooks comedy of 1981, demonstrates the man's unsurpassed gifts in the comedy of excruciation. As Robert Cole, a film editor by trade, and a torturer of his girlfriend by avocation, Brooks may never have been so utterly worm-like and spineless ... not even in his previous film, the classic Real Life. 


At the beginning, Cole and Mary (Kathryn Harrold) have split up. Cole's moaning causes his co-worker (Bruno Kirby) to offer him a pair of Quaaludes as anesthesia. By late the next evening, the couple is back together ... and Cole does his best to drive Mary away through his excessive neurosis, jealousy and fulsome attempts to be a thoughtful lover. Harrold plays Mary as kind and meek, as innocent as a victim in a Poe story. The blame is strictly on Cole, who is determined to ruin a good thing: When not stalking Mary, he does a little work on himself.  Cole is the kind of fool who bought $50 running shoes, took one fast sprint in them, and put them back in his closet for good. Brooks' brother, the children's entertainer "Super Dave" Einstein, plays the sporting good salesman who suckers Cole into every possible  accessory, including a wrist wallet. ("What, you gonna run broke?")

In between these diversions, Cole works as an editor on a space opera starring George Kennedy for American International Pictures. Despite the minuscule budget, everything stalls out while the director nitpicks over one little Foley effect, the question of what footsteps sound like in a space station. These scenes are an accurate picture of everyday Industry toil: the effort of working exactingly on a detail no one will notice, in a film no one is waiting to see.

It's an easy exercise to compare Brooks to Woody Allen  --  even David Thomson does it  --  but Modern Romance proves how individual Brooks' style is. True, like Brooks, Allen is a verbal, Jewish comedian, and both learned their chops from Bob Hope. Both know how to get laughs by smothering a girl with kindness, or from driving her nuts from whining. But Allen is a nervous talent, filling up a comedy with jokes -- rackety ones, sometimes, as if he were afraid of silence. By contrast, Brooks is an artist with negative space. He stretches out uncomfortable quiet moments. It's a comedy of blank space not much practiced in America, but one sees a lot of it in French films when M. Hulot is pausing over an ugly article of modernism, or when some couple is chafing from boredom in a drawing room.   Hesitation frames Brooks' s minutes of dithering over a telephone and deciding to dial that forbidden number, of keeping watch on an ex-girlfriend's front door, and of venting emotions that are a mile wide and an inch deep.

The 1980s were the era in which the 'Me' Decade's lessons percolated to the rest of the world. And the 1980s were to passive-aggressiveness what the Renaissance was to sculpture. As a satirist, Brooks was the era's Michaelangelo, the king of pusillanimousness.  Even Brooks' body is good for the comedy of this era: in Modern Romance, he bares shoulders of such astonishing hairiness that they suggest the man was upholstered from head to toe in velour.

I can also endorse Brooks' first film, Real Life  --  a deathless satire of how reality filmmaking degrades reality; it's recommended as counter programming to American Dreamz. In Real Life, Brooks showed how a show-biz background might be the worst equipment with which to observe the delicate little details of life. Cole is a seemingly gentler person then the "Albert Brooks" character starring in Real Life.  While tailing Mary, ruining a vacation trip with his suspicions, or studying her telephone bill like a detective, Brooks still manages to play a guy with no apparent rage in him. This is the key to Brooks' comedy: his niceness. His Cole is the worst kind of emotional bully, the kind who is completely unaware of his will to power. Auguring out a confession of love, bothering his special lady at work, or hashing out the details of misunderstanding, Brooks held up a mirror to the sensitive man of his era. Oh, if only someone  --  someone like Noah Baumbach, maybe? -- would go after the shoe-gazer of today.