Lost in America (1985)

(On Cable TV, July 2022) Thirty-five years later, Lost in America’s laughs have shifted in ways writer-director-star Albert Brooks couldn’t quite anticipate. The idea of a yuppie couple getting rid of everything in order to wander throughout America in an RV is almost the plot of an Oscar-winning drama hailed for its contemporary sensibilities (Nomadland), and the very concept of yuppie ennui seems quaintly naïve in a real world where pandemics, climate catastrophe and political barbarism have become accepted touch points. Bouts of misogyny, entitlement and dumb plotting don’t help the result, and so Lost in America doesn’t feel like much of a comedy anymore, despite clearly having been created as such. Our plot gets rolling literally, as our lead couple is frustrated by professional setbacks and liquidate their holdings to travel throughout the United States. Except that she unaccountably blows the rest of their savings in Vegas and they find themselves stuck in Arizona, at the lowest rung of the working class. The film clearly aims to be something more than a silly comedy but it’s most effective when compared against something—in this case, 1980s Hollywood’s obsession that Regan-era material success and a nice lifestyle were somehow corrosive and wrong. Fast-forward to 2022, where housing is financially unattainable, going out in public may get you a fatal illness and climate-related extreme weather is destroying housing, and viewers would enjoy slapping the characters of this film for the extravagant privilege of choosing to leave it all behind. But that was the joke even back then—what’s left today, however, is a bitter mixture of humiliation “comedy” (such as the protagonists arguing that a casino should give their lost money back) and what seems like a missing third act when characters decide to do what they could have done at any point of the film and a few title cards tell the rest of the story. Lost in America, fittingly, never finds a destination—it just ambles on until it pulls on the side of the road and calls it quit. There are still a few chuckles (even if Julie Hagerty gets saddled with an inglorious role as the irresponsible one required for the plot to move forward) but they’re substantially more bitter now. Whether this is an improvement (and something that further reinforces Brooks’ intention) is something that viewers will need to decide for themselves.