Broadcast News
Ugh. I know I’m supposed to like this, but … ugh. James L. Brooks is just so hard to take. He’s certainly up to something — you wouldn’t mistake one of his movies for anybody else’s. He creates emotionally rich studies of smart, complicated people. But I don’t think what he does is cinema. It’s mostly people standing around and talking, and the dialogue is dense, wordy and patently false. He has the actors throw in stammers and mistakes every now and again in a transparently thin attempt to approximate the rhythms of actual speech. But mostly he just allows them to let fly with their feelings in a hyperarticulate manner that just doesn’t happen except in stage plays. On screen, the result is clunky and cloying. Brooks won’t allow the audience to discover through action the loneliness and desperation of the Holly Hunter character: Early on, he has her burst into tears whenever she’s by herself.
Thematically, he’s onto something as he explores the dumbing-down of network news. But the specifics never feel right. The vapid William Hurt character enjoys a meteoric rise because he’s good-looking and smooth on camera, but Brooks shortchanges the work even he would have to do to get the stories he gets. The layoffs that decimate the newsroom appear to come from nowhere, and Hunter’s climactic discovery of an ethical lapse by Hurt rings false, too — what he did should be readily apparent to any professional broadcaster who was paying the slightest attention.
All that said, Brooks gives his actors plenty to chew on. Hunter and Albert Brooks are wonderful as driven, principled and emotionally infantile workaholics. And Hurt is simply brilliant. He sets his fierce intelligence aside so casually it’s breathtaking. Yet he’s far from an empty shell: He’s driven to succeed, too, and genuinely thrilled to discover that he’s good at something. He personifies everything that’s wrong with the news business, and yet he has roundness and fullness. You root for him. You feel that he really does want to pay his dues instead of simply accepting every promotion that comes his way. Hurt had leading-man looks in the ’80s (”Broacast News” was released in 1987), and yet he approached his parts like the character actor he’s always been. I will remember his performance fondly as I reflect with satisfaction that I never have to see this movie again.