Modern Romance (1981)

good back-story, and good acting

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Albert Brooks wrote, directed, and stars in this comedic/tragic tale of Kathryn Harrold's on and off romance with a man who just could not make up his mind. To the neurotic and semi-paranoid Brooks, the world looks like an optical illusion, a social Necker cube, in which someone's well-intentioned remark can turn with a flash into a put down. The overt can instantly seem covert.The irony is that all of this difficulty is internal. It's Brooks' own insecurity, his self doubt and self reassurance that's causing the anguish. His girl friend loves him but is exasperated by his possessivness and distrust. Is she seeing some other guy on the side? Who did she call at three in the morning? His girl friend is Kathryn Harrold. She swallows the screen whole whenever she appears. She could gang bang every man in the city of Dubuque, Iowa, as long as she came home to me once in a while.Taken as a whole, the movie has its longueurs. It's fun to see Brooks stone on Ludes and calling up old friends to tell them he loves them, but it does go on. The direction, though, is in no way amateurish. Still stoned, Brooks stumbles out of his house, gets into his Porsche, determined to visit Harrold, wrestles with the ignition, and then falls dead asleep. And Brooks the director never takes us for one second inside the Porsche. We can't even see Brooks through the window, just his mumbling and the silence that follows, until night turns to day -- all in one shot. Nicely done. Put succinctly, my feeling was that if you like Woody Allen, you'll like this film. Not that Brooks deliberately imitates Allen but just that they draw their water from the same cultural well.

Albert Brooks starred and also co-wrote the script with Monica McGowan Johnson. He plays Robert, a Hollywood film editor, who is in a roller-coaster of a relationship with Mary, a bank executive. The film pretty much drops in on one go-round of what is clearly there standard cycle of breaking up and falling madly in love again.It's quite a good film. Brooks is on the likable side of neurotic, and Kathryn Harrold as Mary is quite charming. James L. Brooks plays the director of the film that Robert is editing (He later cast Albert Brooks in Broadcast News.), and Bruno Kirby plays Robert's co-worker, Jay.The film is full of memorable scenes, including a bit of an extended sequence with Robert at home after he takes Quaalude's that is pure gold and quite a bit more underplayed than the Quaalude scene in Scorcese's The Wolf of Wall Street.It was interesting to watch this film in the context of the way films and television tackle relationships today - it feels a bit of a precursor to modern relationship comedies. The humor can be subtle and sometimes requires patience but it can really pay off. It's a well-paced film, too. I heard somewhere that - of all people - Stanley Kubrick was a big fan of the film! I guess the one thing that really stood out for me is that these two people really had nothing in common. Why would Mary want a guy who seems sweet but is really just obsessing about her? Once he gets that white picket fence and her behind it, to what will his obsessions turn?

Man, Albert Brooks is a trip in this movie. He's like the template for George Costanza, pushing his usual neurotic persona to the point of comically unlikable. It's not enough that he has to dog his ex until they get back together, but when she actually relents, he goes into paranoia overload. He's that kind of boyfriend who just won't leave well enough alone. It's almost painful but this is right in the man's wheelhouse, so he makes it funny. And you've gotta feel bad for Kathryn Harrold for putting up with all of this. Also of note here is a put-upon Bruno Kirby and "Super Dave" Osborn as a hustling sporting goods salesman.As awful as Brooks' character is, the movie remains compulsively watchable. 8/10

Having read the other comments on this film, I would like to share my own view that this is one tough movie to see unless you are a total Brooksophile. I am not.When looked at by a purely objective observer, the film is an unbalanced narrative that presents us with more undistilled neuroses than are capable of being absorbed in one sitting. It is quite difficult to watch. The Brooks character (Robert Cole) is so unsympathetic and unpleasant that it is hard to relate to him---let alone root for him as he stumbles from one dysfunctional self-absorbed situation to the next. And he should NEVER do a topless scene and expect to be taken seriously in a romantic context. No man could have that much exposed foliage and be supposed to turn on a babe like Kathryn Harrold----unless, of course, he is Albert Brooks in an Albert Brooks-controlled production."Modern Romance" has its amusing moments-----but they are fragmentary and infrequent. More often than not, I felt as if I were on a confined journey with a thoroughly dislikable person and wishing that it would end already. It confirms the problems that can develop when too much control of a film is placed in only one person---someone who lacks the self-discipline to be able to step back from it and see what is clearly happening.As most people probably know, James L. Brooks, who played the director in this film, is in fact what he portrayed. Six years later, he cast Albert Brooks in the very successful "Broadcast News." James showed us how Albert can shape a credible and entertaining comic performance. Albert allowed us to see James (generally not cast as an actor) do a rare comic turn in a surprisingly effective manner.Fans of "Modern Romance" will by now have moved on to the next laudatory comment about it. To you I say-----there is enough pain in the world without having to find it in a film intended as an entertainment.