Broadcast News

Well-acted, touching love triangle that wants to say something about the media.

From the Criterion website, again. They should give me a subscription already! Fair use.

Broadcast News (1987). Grade: B-

Can you give a great performance in a shallowly-conceived role? Holly Hunter’s trying to prove you can.

She’s a network news producer based in Washington, D.C. She’s got a longstanding “friend zone” relationship with reporter Albert Brooks. New at the office is airheady William Hurt. Hunter loathes everything Hurt’s character stands for — empty-headed, handsome faces replacing newscasters who actually know the subjects they’re talking about. She hates everything Hurt represents… but she’s kinda got the hots for him, too.

The notion that TV news “was,” once upon a time, so incredibly principled, and “became” shallow is rather a silly one. I’m not going to ask you to go read the collected works of Noam Chomsky or anything, but even in the heyday of trusted network anchors like Walter Cronkite, there was a strong bias towards reporting the news in a bland, don’t-rock-the-boat sort of way.

Take Cronkite’s famous 1968 broadcast speech on the aftermath of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. (Written by producer Ernest Leiser.) It states the various obstacles the US faced in that war, ending with: “it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”

That’s nice and inoffensive. To us. If you’re close to one of the million+ people killed in Vietnam, essentially for the crime of wanting a government that Washington didn’t like, the phrase “pledge to defend democracy” would sound pretty ridiculous.

The “news” presented in Broadcast News seems, to me, like mostly fluff — even when it’s covering serious subjects, it’s being done in the shallowest ways. (And that’s when determined, principled Hunter and Brooks are doing it — later, Hurt does it shallower still.) In this era, I might have watched Peter Jennings or Dan Rather and thought them really bright guys — no doubt they are fairly bright guys — but, I was also a teenager. When I see clips of “serious” 80s journalists Sam Donaldson or Ted Koppel now, I basically cringe. Nothing they’re saying is aggressively foolish or necessarily wrong, it’s just put in the most obvious way, so that the dumbest viewers won’t be perplexed.

It’s also quite a stretch to write a script venerating “smartness” and decrying “shallowness” when you’ve worked in TV for decades, as writer/director James L. Brooks had. I will grant that Lou Grant, Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda, Taxi are better than the average programs on TV. But being better than Gilligan’s Island is not exactly a high bar. If you ever make a movie with Adam Sandler — and Brooks would — you are not challenging audiences to expect more from movies than what’s already popular. And neither, really, is Broadcast News.

It’s watchable and mostly enjoyable anyways, because of the acting. William Hurt was probably a louse in his personal life, but he was one heckuva actor. Playing a dumb guy is a dangerous thing. It frequently comes off as repellent, or as smugly condescending. Hurt doesn’t; he seems genuinely pained by being a little ignorant. In Carrie Rickey’s Criterion essay, she writes, “on him, slowness looks like contemplation.” Hurt gets his character’s intellectual insecurities, and lets his perfectly-fluffed hair express his vanity.

Albert Brooks is always been a weird actor — he never seems like he’s acting at all, not in roles like this. (When he’s played a bad guy, he does — he’s quite good at it, too.) This is very like the roles Brooks wrote for himself in Lost in America and Defending Your Life, but not as funny — in those, he’s a little too sure of himself, and it’s hilarious. In this, he’s only down on himself for his lonely personal life, he’s thrilled with his own intelligence (and we’re not supposed to see that as funny). At one point, he tries embarassing Hurt by proving he knows more about the President’s Cabinet than Hurt does. Really, does it matter if you know their names? The important thing is to know what they’re doing. Which, in the Reagan years, was pretty scary stuff. Wanna see somthing really scary?

You do feel for Brooks, though, becasue he’s so smitten with Hunter. Just like you feel for Hurt, because he’s smitten with Hunter. (And you felt for Nic Cage in Raising Arizona for the same reason.) No person of good sense WOULDN’T be in love with Holly Hunter. (I really want to watch Home For the Holidays again, now, but it’s only six months to Christmas, I guess I can wait.)

She’s very lovable here, sharp and energetic while also being very vulnerable. Unfortunately, the role’s not a character, it’s a type. (So’s every role in the film.) When we see her scrambling to add extra touches to a segment seconds before it’s due to air, what she adds seems pretty darn pointless. There’s repeated scenes where, out of almost nowhere, she’ll just start weeping over what a disaster her love life is (these feel like the fakest moments in Nora Ephron films). In one really foolishly-written bit, Hunter’s giving a speech on the dumbing down of the news industry, and everyone in the audience gets mad at her, stands up and leaves. That wouldn’t happen!¹

Still, the romantic triangle here has real feeling to it. We can’t help who we’re attracted to and who we aren’t. Our feelings may change over time, but we’re not going to be in charge of that. Hunter absolutely adores Brooks and won’t go a day without talking to him… she’s just not attracted to him. The script goes wrong when it shows her as being surprised when he declares his feelings — I think she’d have already known. This is a minor blip, though, their conflicting feelings have sincerity. I believed in them.

And you can see why she’s drawn to Hurt, he sees her as stunning (and she is). Who among us hasn’t ever been charmed outta our wits by a very attractive person paying us attention? There’s even something to be said for dating someone who’s very different than you in some ways, you might be more likely to surprise each other. Although that can work in the wrong direction too… which it does here.

There’s a strange, touching coda that works really well. Supposedly, Brooks wasn’t quite sure until the movie was well into production how he wanted the love story to resolve, and you can see an alternate ending on the Criterion disc; it’s terrible. Brooks was right to go with the one he did.

One aspect of the “what’s going wrong with the news” plot does ring true; the budget cuts and downsizing. In older periods of TV news, it wasn’t expected to make a profit. That’s what the sitcoms were for. But as corporate conglomerates assumed more control over the networks, the news division was expected to make money just like everything else. It’s wryly funny when a late plot point has a character being transferred to the London bureau, and it’s a huge promotion. Does any network besides the BBC even HAVE a London bureau anymore? Even most of the big newspapers don’t.

A sidebar, but perhaps one of note, is an interesting observation I read lately from someone who used to work at the Toronto Star newspaper. (I’m sorry I can’t remember who wrote it or where it appeared — the news is so fast and infuriating, these days, I don’t remember where I saw everything.) It pointed out that, once upon a time, while the members of the writing/editorial staff might be a little better-educated and a little better-paid than the average reader, the newspaper itself was still largely a physical job. All the printers and delivery drivers. When you had company picnics, that’s who you played softball with. So it was less likely that journalists would ignore working-class concerns the way they frequently do now.

Still, much of the dumbification of our current media is quite simply, profit-driven. It’s simplistic and tells people what they want to hear because that’s what makes the most money. And no individual reporter’s personal feelings about what other stories they should be covering is likely to matter. It matters if you work at ProPublica or The American Prospect or something else non-profit like that. It doesn’t on any of the commercial TV networks. And most of the people working at such places know it. There’s a funny book, An Atheist in the Fox Hole, by Joe Muto, about working for that network. Most of the staff don’t believe in what they’re doing. It’s just a way to get a job in the super-competitive TV business.

So, in a way, the “ethical dilemmas” being wrestled with in Broadcast News are sort of charmingly simplistic. They weren’t a serious critique of the news at the time, and would be utterly meaningless today. You sort of appreciate the underthought idealism, though. Better shallow idealism than none at all.

Aside from Hunter/Hurt/Brooks, there isn’t much going on here. Joan Cusack has some fun moments, because she’s always fun. Jack Nicholson has a few stern scenes that work well. There’s a very funny bit by real-life composers Glen Roven and Marc Shaiman as two composers pitching their new news theme music; Shaiman would later write the music for the very vulgar songs in the South Park movie, which for the first two-thirds or so is one of the best musicals in recent memory. Very naughty stuff, though!

James L. Brooks would later go on to help produce The Simpsons, which did have its great years, and little-seen cartoon The Critic, with Jon Lovitz as a lonely schlub of a movie nerd. I always liked that one; Siskel & Ebert didn’t! And Brooks wrote/directed Terms of Endearment and As Good as it Gets, which are both a lot like this film; the serious plotty stuff probably isn’t serious enough, yet the emotions are powerful, they get to you.

If you want real analysis of what’s wrong with the media, you won’t get it in this movie. But you’ll probably laugh at a few lines, and you’ll really root for Holly Hunter. Was she someone underused by Hollywood, as so many of our great actors are? Or did she simply like to do oddball things that interested her? I don’t know. But she’s the best thing in this one. And, arguably, the best thing in The Incredibles, too!

1. It could, possibly, be inspired by a similar speech that the famous journalist Edward R. Murrow gave in Chicago, in 1958, which DID tick off some people in the industry, although there wasn’t a mass walkout. Brooks worked at Murrow’s old employer, CBS, a few years after that speech. No doubt he heard about it.