Awards & Honors

The National Society of Film Critics gave Albert Brooks and Monica Mcgowan Johnson the award for Best Screenplay.

Film Critics Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Dave Kehr (Chicago Reader), and J. Hoberman and Andrew Sarris (both of The Village Voice) put the film in their list of Top Ten Movies for 1985.

The film was rated number 80 on Bravo television network's 2006 list of the 100 Funniest Movies.

The film came in at number 84 on the American Film Institute's list of the funniest movies of all time, issued in 2000.

In its 1999 year-end Millennium issue, Rolling Stone magazine and its film critic Peter Travers offered picks for the essential movies of the preceding century that were made by mavericks who "busted rules to follow their obsessions...in the defiant spirit of rock & roll." Lost in America was ranked number 76.

The Independent Film Channel (IFC) rated the scene of David leaving his ad agency after the blow-up with his boss as the number 8 best job-quitting scene of all time.

The Critics' Corner: LOST IN AMERICA

"Observant and very funny. Brooks is especially good at hearing exactly how people talk, and how that reveals things about themselves." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, March 15, 1985

"An inspired comedy in [Brooks's] own dryly distinctive style. If Mr. Brooks isn't often laugh-out-loud funny, that's largely because so much of what he has to say is true. ... Mr. Brooks and Monica Johnson have written Lost in America as a one-man show that both embraces and lacerates the character Mr. Brooks plays. That attitude is more realistic than self-contradictory, given their droll, uncompromising vision of David's life and its limitations." - Janet Maslin, New York Times, February 15, 1985

"Lost in America isn't as pungent as it might be: the dialogue has flaccid patches; the story just goes on for a while, then knocks off rather than concludes. But two elements give it some charm. First, its ease. ... Second, the ironies. ... Lost in America strikes a small, if not quite sharp enough, blow at the sentimentalities about the superiority of country over city, moral and otherwise, the superiority of subsistence over comfort." - Stanley Kaufman, The New Republic, March 18, 1985

"Brooks is a shrewd, deadpan observer of the secret life of middle-class Americans. He likes to bring their dreams of glorious escape to life, let them taste their new world, then watch them scurry back to the comfortable and familiar. His comedy would be cruel if Brooks were not so good at playing the victims he concocts: so pompously thrilled as he rationalizes their lurches off the beaten track, so bone scared when things go awry. In Hagerty and Garry Marshall, the TV mastermind who plays a casino boss, he has glorious foils. Lost in America does not conclude; it merely ends, as if Brooks had run out of money or inspiration before he could think up a third act. But the year is unlikely to produce a funnier unfinished symphony." - Richard Schickel, Time, March 18, 1985

"Albert Brooks may have conceived this character because he saw the possibilities for this kind of maddening twerp in himself, but David is a fully created obsessive fool. He's a highly verbal jerk who half knows he's behaving like a jerk but can't stop himself-he's a self-conscious, pesky toddler at loose in the world. But though he's tiresome to everybody in the movie, he isn't tiresome to us. David's lines have been sharpened to a fatuous fine edge - he keeps us laughing at him. And Lost in America doesn't dawdle; it makes its comic points and moves on. Julie Hagerty is an ideal choice for David's mate: you listen to Hagerty's Linda and you know why she puts up with him. Her little-girl breathiness tells you. And the dim stress and panic of her gaze suggest that somewhere in the past she has been frightened and David is the Teddy bear she clutches. (These two are endlessly apologizing to each other; they do it so automatically they might be apologizing in their sleep.) ... The movie is so good that it needs to flower; it's like a Sturges idea that runs dry. But it's still a nifty, original comedy. The performances in the along-the-road vignettes are like a series of small presents to the audience. ... It would be great if Albert Brooks could get to the point of showing the interaction of a group of these contemporary monomaniacs - which is essentially what Sturges did (though Sturges didn't rip the characters from inside himself). Brooks is on to something: satirizing the upper middle class from within, he shows the nagging terror along with the complacency." - Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, April 18, 1985

"It is too bad that in Lost in America Albert Brooks is only kidding; all the film needs to be a devastating comedy is a little seriousness. The impossibility of breaking out of the system, the robotization of the career-oriented, upwardly mobile middle-class couple who, even with a shove of fate to nudge them along, cannot start afresh in some spontaneous, grass-roots, laterally mobile way, has powerful seriocomic potential; not for nothing has Preston Sturges's name been invoked in connection with this film. But despite a fine farcical frenzy, acute observation of everyday absurdities, and some wrenchingly comic episodes, the film cannot lift itself into high comedy, even if it towers over whatever else is around." - John Simon, National Review, May 17, 1985

"Albert Brooks' movies contain speeches of mad comic indignation that hold up like Shakespearean soliloquies. There is, for instance, the Nest Egg Principle speech from Lost in America. - Paul Brownfield, Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1999

by Rob Nixon