Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration. Brooks still has plenty of kinks in his cables, to judge from the end of the movie, in which he's hitting on a stranger at a filling station. He's John Henderson, a writer of science-fiction novels who's blocked in both his profession and his social life. He's stuck for an idea for a new book and lives in the wreckage of two failed marriages (the opening shot of Brooks entering his near-empty apartment and rearranging the two remaining sticks of furniture epitomizes his sardonic humor). An inspiration strikes him: to figure out what's wrong with his life he must relive and understand his primal relationship. So he does what most of us in similar situations only dream of -- he moves in with his mother. It's kind of an Oedipal The Mirror Has Two Faces with laughs and without Barbra Streisand.

He calls it "the experiment," and at first it seems woefully misconceived. Beatrice (Debbie Reynolds), named perhaps with an ironic reference to Dante's seminal beloved, is the mother of all mothers, one who can re-create the psychological damage inflicted over a lifetime with a simple misapplication of call-waiting. Played by Reynolds against type in a stunning return to the screen after a 27-year absence, Beatrice seems both blithely unconscious of her perpetual putdowns and supremely deft in her manipulativeness. Self-possessed, riddled with annoying oddities, well-intended, and sadistic, she welcomes John home not with open arms but with skepticism, beef stew (he's a vegetarian), a month-old salad, blighted ice cream, and a three-year-old frozen wheel of cheese.

A lot of the torture relates, of course, to food. Shopping with mom proves revealing but not therapeutic. Major crises erupt over whether to buy generic peanut butter or splurge an additional 91 cents for organic. Once home, Beatrice divides the refrigerator into "his" and "hers" zones so his Haägen-Dazs won't corrupt her more sensible, inexpensive products. "It's like It Happened One Night with food," laments John.

And so it is. Like most romantic comedies, Mother is a love story that achieves the impossible task of reconciling social opposites. Usually the opposites are different classes; here it's different generations. John embodies the self-indulgent, self-pitying boomers whose chief ambition is self-fulfillment. His relationships with women are doomed by overanalysis and opacity, and he seeks solutions by blaming his upbringing. "I don't need a doctor, I need my mother," is typical of canards that reveal his inability to accept responsibility for his own pathology. Beatrice, on the other hand, is the prickly figurehead of a generation whose credo was sacrifice for others and submission to the status quo. Now that her life over and her oldest son is a whiner struggling in what for her is a dubious profession (her negative comparisons to Stephen King are especially galling to John) and seemingly intent on pinning all his failures on her -- naturally she's pissed.

Such is the dry, generic formula Mother follows. When Brooks sticks too close to it, the film does get a little formulaic. And when John finally solves his mother problem by finding a cache of her unpublished stories (she had abandoned her ambition for the career John flounders at in order to raise her family), the "experiment" doesn't feels very experimental.

But the splendid pas de deux between Brooks and Reynolds sails above all restricting conventions. Whether he's outraging her by taking her into Victoria's Secret to buy her crotchless panties, or she's outraging him by bringing home her hot-to-trot boyfriend for a night of nookie, the give and take is brilliantly witty, buoyant, and sad. The supporting players are necessarily overshadowed, though Rob Morrow's turn as John's younger, jealous, highly successful brother, Jeff (he's a sports agent -- shades of Jerry Maguire), adds a zesty tang of sibling rivalry. But mothers have a way of overpowering all, even an errant child's effort to comprehend and love them. Despite Brooks's pop-psychological resolution, Mother remains an enigma, an endless source of hilarity and woe. Expect a sequel.

Like Woody Allen but darker and weirder and usually funnier, Albert Brooks makes a living acting out his neuroses on the screen. He admits the process is therapeutic, especially in his new film, the Freudian grab bag of gags with the loaded title of Mother.

"I find that before you make them you have to work through the problems," he says. "So that is the therapeutic part. I had to reach a point with my mother years ago where I got it, I figured out why she is who she is and why our relationship was the way it was. Then I could make a movie about it."

Still, he believes the film is more universal than personal. "It's autobiographical in that my mother represented a great many women who grew up at a certain time. She sort of gave up a career to raise children. She freezes everything that can be frozen. If you open up her refrigerator, you won't recognize any real brand of food. It looks like real food -- the cookies are black with creme in the middle, but they're called something like `Sorreos.' Not the real name. And she certainly can't operate anything that comes with a telephone. I think all the mothers I've ever met are like that.

"Years ago whenever she'd fly -- I'm a big stereo buff -- she thought she was doing me a favor by stealing the headphones. But they're the kind with the holes in it. I said, unless you take the whole seat it doesn't fit. She just doesn't get it."

Has he ever toyed with the idea of moving back in with her?

" I guess people are really moving back in with their parents. I saw Time magazine calling it a trend, but more for financial reasons. For psychological reasons it's a funny idea to really do it. I don't want to move back in with my mother, but I could. The characters carry out that fantasy for real."

Comedy and filmmaking, Brooks believes, embody that process, a way of casting one's desires before an indifferent world. "Who doesn't struggle with the world? Chaplin fought the world too. It's sort of what comedy is. Trying literally to pursue a dream instead of just dreaming it. You buy the motor home. You hit the bus and die."

The world Brooks struggles most against is the Hollywood industry. Although critically acclaimed, his films bewilder the studios that market them.

"I would like more people to see my films. Who wouldn't? But I can't make that happen. Greater people than myself have attempted it; I don't think van Gogh was selling well. I wish I were mainstream and Tommy Boy were the oddity. What a wonderful world it would be to live in if my sensibility were mainstream.

"The lowest point was with Modern Romance. In order to finish, I had to show it to preview audiences. They didn't like it. The studio called in. They said, `Read these cards.' I said I didn't want to. So they read them to me. `He's got a good-looking girl, a Porsche, what's his problem?' I said, `I don't know what his problem is.' They said, have a psychiatrist scene -- explain his problem or you won't have a second week.

"I was so depressed I slept for two weeks. I didn't want to make movies again. Then Stanley Kubrick called me out of the blue. He said, `This film could have made $50 million if they wanted it to. These decisions have nothing to do with you. They are decided by the studio. Do not take it seriously. It's happened to me. A Clockwork Orange -- they hated it.' The call helped me a lot."

Mother, however, is a film Brooks thinks everyone can love. "This movie plays pretty well everywhere. There's no prerequisite. You don't have to have a college education. You have to have a mother. I've seen it: that ice cream is in everyone's freezer in America. That colorless ice cream -- I've seen Japanese people laugh at that."

-- Peter Keough