"No hugging, no learning" is reportedly the mantra of the creators of Seinfeld, and I fervently hope that Albert Brooks adopts that credo as a New Year's resolution...or at least at some point during the 4-6 years that it'll probably take him to finance and complete his next movie. His first three films as co-writer/director -- Real Life, Modern Romance, and Lost in America -- established him as the gutsiest comic mind in Hollywood; unlike most of his peers, Brooks apparently had no interest in being well-liked, and the characters he played in those early films are notable for being almost completely unsympathetic -- so much so that many scenes provoke pained gasps as often as they do laughter. In 1991's Defending Your Life, however, Brooks tempered his scabrous wit with some squishy, New Age philosophizing -- the film actually has a Message, and could just as accurately be titled Confronting Your Fears, which sounds uncomfortably like a best-selling self-help tome -- and Mother, his latest and least successful film, is essentially one long therapy session, albeit often a very funny one. The premise, which has Brooks moving back into his old room at his mother's house in an attempt to find out why he can't relate to women, is dynamite, and there are plenty of hilarious moments (most of them courtesy of Debbie Reynolds, who is beautifully understated as the title character); as always, Brooks is adept at writing apparently casual, everyday conversations that are laced with shocks of recognition and unforced witticisms (the script, like that of all of his features save Defending Your Life, was co-written with Monica Johnson, who perhaps deserves more recognition than she receives). But Brooks is no longer content "merely" to get laughs by depicting unchecked neurosis; now, his characters must grow in the process, and a sense of order must be restored. The final reel of Mother is so chockablock with hugging and learning and healing that I half-expected Barney to bound into the frame at any moment and kick off a peppy musical number; The Sound of Music seems positively Dickensian by comparison. This feel-good conclusion is so antithetical to Brooks' previous worldview that it feels like a betrayal; at the very least, it undermines much of what precedes it, so that the whole enterprise seems less like a movie than like an extended advertisement for family counseling. The more Brooks relaxes, the less interesting his work becomes. Unfortunately, and predictably, its financial success is directly proportional to its warm-fuzziness quotient (Mother is doing very well indeed) and so it's exceedingly unlikely that this mellowing trend will reverse itself anytime soon. We can only hope that Brooks eventually goes the Douglas Sirk route, making nominally conventional pictures with subtexts that criticize the very conventions being employed on the surface. In fact...hmm. Maybe I should see Mother again...