94/100

Albert Brooks as an artist burrows so far into scenarios of neurosis that it goes beyond a personal feel and instead takes on a darker, universal image. Robert is a jealous, unstable individual in spite of his delusions of understanding, but he's engrossing and relatable nonetheless. We'd all be lying, or at least, *I'd* be lying, if we said we didn't identify in any way with this man. He is an exaggerated amalgamation of our fears, insecurities, and anxieties, but there's a great deal of truth in his life and in his relationship, and Modern Romance glides through a concentrated section of honest emotional weight while still making you laugh. Comedy and heartbreak go hand in hand, with sly…

The truly amazing thing about Albert Brooks's "Modern Romance" is how subtle its depths truly are. At one point, Mary (Kathryn Harrold) offhandedly wonders aloud to Robert (Brooks) whether his conception of romance is based more on movie fantasy than reality—but this rhetorical observation doesn't really resonate until, later on in the film, we see Robert's clingy obsessiveness pitted against Mary's careerist leanings first at that business dinner he interrupts, then in the cabin-in-the-woods finale. Maybe it's not so much that Robert lives in a fantasy world, but that his over-idealized conception of romance simply can't help but seem almost quaint in modern society. But, of course, Brooks's comic intelligence is too sharp to settle for such facile nostalgia; he's…

Watched this again because my girlfriend hadn't seen it, and because I'm writing a script that has the kind of extended, observational comic setpieces that Albert Brooks excels at. The best example in Modern Romance is the scene where his character, Robert, wanders around his house after taking two quaaludes following his breakup with Mary (Kathryn Harrold). It's easy to write some broadly funny business for a stoned character acting like an idiot, but much harder to do what Brooks does here, following the character from frustration at the possibility that the pills aren't working, to professing his platonic love to his co-worker (Bruno Kirby), marvelling at his record collection, deciding that music makes him sad, talking to his pet…

I first saw this Albert Brooks movie after a break-up in my 20s, and it was almost unbearable. I cringed at every awful choice Brooks’ character made, how he seemed to be sabotaging his relationship as much as his own interior life, in the guise of trying to save it.

Many years later, Modern Romance is a flippin’ delight, for all the reasons I wanted to shut off the videotape before. We’re like this. Maybe not this much this, but like this.

After Brooks breaks up with Kathryn Harrold in the opening scene (which they’ve apparently done many times before) he immediately goes on a series of tangents trying to ride out of his broken heart. He pops a quaalude,…