The problem with James L. Brooks’ Broadcast
News, viewed nowadays, isn’t so much that it seems dated (how could it not?) but rather that the way in which it’s dated isn’t particularly instructive regarding the
movie’s own time, or our own, or the transition between the two. Take for
example the big ethical reveal that drives the final stretch: the discovery
that the empathetic tears of on-the-rise reporter Tom Grunick as he listens to
an interviewee in one of the stories that made his name were filmed afterwards
and edited into the flow. The revelation hardly lands now as intended (did it
ever?), both because from what’s shown in the film, it’s not believable that a
crew of experienced news people wouldn’t have tuned into it at the time, and more
broadly because compared to the subsequent travails and degradations of politics
and culture, it just doesn’t seem like an important enough violation to change
the direction of things (one wonders more generally about the plausibility of a
Washington bureau where there’s almost no talk about politics). Still, William
Hurt was arguably never better than in his perfect calibration of Grunick, possessed
of almost supernatural on-screen ease, exactly smart enough to know his considerable
limitations; Albert Brooks’ Aaron Altman, in contrast, ideally conveys someone
possibly too smart for his own good, held back both personally and
professionally by a missing X-factor. Holly Hunter’s Jane, the best-rounded professional
of the three, is an object of admiration and desire for both, a device undermined
by the film’s emotional shallowness and sexual timidity. Brooks allows rather
too much padding, as in some pointless opening vignettes of the three leads as
children, and the film doesn’t have much of what you might call cinematic
writing, but of course it’s an amiably professional job, in much the way that
network prime time once connoted.
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