The Talkies / Back to the Newsroom

...The Mary 'Brier Moore Show...

...Jane, by the way, is responsible for Jennifer's reassignment—an act which seems at least as morally objectionable as Tom's faked tears...

...By the time the opening credits are rolling (as in Terms, they follow the teaser), we know that this is a film by a man who thinks of character as something that can be summed up in a single snappy exchange, a sharp one-liner...

...it's a confusingly written part which requires him to be at once a self-seeking, know-nothing jerk—the embodiment of everything that's wrong with TV news—and a good guy, sweet and modest and well-intentioned...

...Which, alas, is precisely what's wrong with Broadcast News: it falls uncomfortably in the no-man's-land between TV sitcom and movie comedy...

...Holly Hunter is winning in a very Mary Tyler Mooreish way...

...But then, the script of Broadcast News is a most rickety contraption indeed, and when in its final pages Jane must decide whether to love Tom or leave him, the whole fragile structure collapses...

...One wonders why Hurt took it on...

...nor, though his house was full of pictures Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...

...Yet while Jane respects everyone else that she works with—is her news team different from all of those represented at the convention?—she has nothing but contempt for Tom...

...Finally, several details in the film seem dubious: Would a local Washington reporter be sent to cover serial murders in Alaska...

...and the nemesis —and love interest—not Ted Baxter but Tom Grunick (William Hurt...

...But its effect is quite the opposite: the sequence is so embarrassingly predictable and contrived, the sentiments so facile and phony, that one staggers out of the theater wondering at the ability of a genuine sitcom talent to make such a mess of things on the big screen...

...Jane, age twelve or so, spends all her time writing...

...How does the film end...

...Instead of respecting his honesty, however, Jane explodes in righteous anger: if he's incompetent, she tells him, he doesn't belong in this business, and should either educate himself fast or find some other line of work...

...one can only hope he finds his way back home...

...To be sure, Brooks pulled the strings well: I laughed my way through Terms, and when Winger died, my eyes teared up, but I left the theater thinking "How phony...

...Young Aaron, for his part, is an obnoxious high-school valedictorian who getsbeat up by his classmates at graduation, then taunts them because they'll never make more than nineteen thousand dollars a year...

...Jane's romantic rival, a glamorous reporter named Jennifer Mack (Lois Chiles), is suddenly packed off in mid-movie to a long-term stint in Anchorage and is never heard from again...

...The heroine I refer to is not Mary Richards but Jane Craig (Holly Hunter...

...He personifies everything that you've been fighting against...

...they're the film's equivalent of the "teaser," that very brief scene which precedes the credits at the beginning of a sitcom, and which exists in TV-land only for practical purposes—namely, to make possible an extra commercial break...

...her best buddy in the newsroom is a wisecracking, goodhearted, first-rate newswriter who's had a crush on her for years...

...this film abounds with gimmicks that might be acceptable in a sitcom but must be counted here as structural flaws...

...Tom, who alone appreciates Jane's standards, would seem a relative paragon...

...the boss, not Lou Grant but Ernie Merriman (Robert Prosky...

...What aggravates this problem is that it doesn't want to be just any movie comedy...

...Brooks's own Terms of Endearment...

...Jane's forced to decide: love him or leave him...

...To be sure, over the course of the film she changes her attitude, and toward movie's end is ready to plight her troth...

...This viewer, for one, assumed all along that Tom's cutaway was fake, and that it was understoodto be so by all concerned...

...This opening sequence is a tidy job, I suppose: a few lines back and forth, and the film's main conflict is set up...

...It's a hilarious bit, but when it gives rise to a long sequence full of soul-searching and bitter accusation—all of which we are meant to take quite seriously—the picture seems like some bizarre collaboration between Mel Brooks and John Cassavetes...

...Namely, Tom appeals to Jane but offends her most fervently held principles...

...Her boss is a burly, balding, gruff-but-lovable fatherly type...

...Though they are drawn to each other, her explosion causes Tom to clear out pronto...

...Yet his is a problematic role...

...as Aaron remarks later (as if we haven't already gotten the point...

...For neither choice is dramatically workable...

...If, on the other hand, she decides to reject his love because of that faked cutaway, such an inane attempt at a "serious" ending cannot but expose the real shallowness of the material—a shallowness that the audience has allowed itself to ignore most of the way through because the majority of the film's "serious" points have been made by way of rapid-fire jokes and sight gags...

...Good sitcom writers use the teaser to hook the audience in...

...It's also nothing more than a cheap visual gag—an unpromising way to begin a movie that wants not only to amuse but to be taken seriously...

...but the film never reconciles this fact with its otherwise condescending view of him...

...Some time after Tom does an interview with a rape victim in which the camera cuts away to show him in tears, Aaron tells Jane that since Tom had only one camera crew, the cutaway must have been filmed afterwards and the tears faked...

...So much for the plot, which at any rate does not develop so much as bounce from gag to gag...

...for instance, right after Young Tom's dad wonders aloud what the future might hold for a boy who's got nothing going for him but looks, we THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 33 freeze on a close-up of the lad and Brooks superimposes the words "Future Network News Anchorman...

...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988...

...Brooks patently thinks this denouement is the sort of epic touch that will send his audience out of the theater recognizing that Broadcast News is not a typical romantic comedy but a sensitive and respectable film—a real story about real people with real feelings...

...Broadcast News confirms that lesson...

...Albert Brooks brings to the movie a wonderful zaniness which I'm sure is exactly what his namesake director wanted but which doesn't work at all when the film shifts into serious gear...

...her nemesis is a dumb-but-handsome anchorman...

...This combination is not easily imagined and, though Hurt does his best, the character never quite comes into focus...

...The movie is Broadcast News, which was written, directed, and produced by James L. Brooks, a co-creator and writer of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show...

...that James L. Brooks doesn't know the difference between persons and personifications, characters and caricatures, emotion and sentimentality...

...This is not the only unaddressed contradiction in his character: Tom'spolished performance as anchor would seem to demonstrate, his (and the film's) claims to the contrary, that he is actually very good at what he does—that he is as skilled a talking head, in other words, as Aaron is a field reporter...

...Brooks is a talented man who has stumbled pathetically into the wrong genre...

...the buddy, not Murray Slaughter but Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks...

...Broadcast News starts off in a similar fashion, with vignettes of the protagonists as children...

...What's important about these prefatory vignettes is that none of them is dramatically necessary...

...If that doesn't happen with sitcoms, it's because their creators rarely stray beyond the genre's boundaries, never drag the phoniness out into the glare of sunlight...

...That one gets a big laugh—mainly, of course, because of the cartoonish image of news anchormen that Brooks himself proffered on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show...

...Nicholson might just as believably have been a retired ballplayer, the ex-mayor of Chillicothe, Ohio, or the host of a syndicated teenage dance program...

...no crowd of TV news people would find Jane's talk sodull, or those dominoes so fascinating...

...Brooks drags Tom's father back into the story for no other reason than to set up a gag...

...but I will say that once all this nonsense is supposedly wrapped up, we're given a "tag" (as they call it in sitcomland) in which we meet our three main characters "seven years later...

...Another of the film's turning points, meanwhile, is overly evocative of the final episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show...

...And what purpose does it serve to drag Jane and Aaron to Nicaragua for a brief, tonally incongruous sequence involving a contra-Sandinista battle...

...Horror of horrors...

...Now, Terms of Endearment—which Brooks adapted very freely from Larry McMurtry's novel—was an odd movie...

...Tom, a sometime sports reporter who's just been hired by her station as a newsman, is on his way up fast, but feels bad about it: "I'm no good at what I do," he confesses to Jane, whom he recognizes as having the intelligence, knowledge, and news sense that he lacks...

...You may recall that Terms began with a prefatory childhood scene: MacLaine, the clinging mother, climbs into a crib in which her infant daughter is bawling her lungs out...

...And it simply doesn't do that...

...But one person in Jane's audience stays to compliment her...

...Yet Jane's hostility to Torn doesn't make sense if you give it a moment's thought...

...But Jane doesn't get any applause, and when the videotape is over the audience exits with unseemly haste...

...I didn't believe Shirley MacLaine for a moment as Debra Winger's possessive but emotionally inexpressive mama, but I bought it as a premise for the duration of the movie because so many funny situations were built upon it...

...At least Brooks gets good performances out of his stars...

...At the end of each of these introductory vignettes, Brooks freezes the frame and superimposes a title (as at the close of Animal House) indicating how the kid will turn out...

...From the credits we cut to Jane as a woman of thirty or so (i.e., Mary Richards's age when she got to Minneapolis...

...If she chooses to go with Tom, she's opting for the predictable romantic-comedy ending, and making it obvious that her declared moral objections to him were just plot gimmickry, and the film's pretensions to seriousness precisely that—pretensions...

...A comedy, that is, with aims much like those of Mr...

...when her father calls her "obsessive," she dresses him down, in classic smart-TV-kid manner, for misusing a word whose precise clinical meaning by no means applies to her psychological state...

...The audience finds her argument boring, and when she presents evidence of the superficiality of TV news—in the form of a network news-show videotape of a domino trick—her colleagues miss (or, actually, ignore) her point entirely and break into laughter and applause: they enjoy the dominoes...

...The sequence at the news convention presumably means to suggest that TV news people are overwhelmingly amoral and unserious...

...It's cute, it's funny, it's a guaranteed laugh...

...I won't give that away...

...Nor—for all his carrying on about the topic—does his understanding of the moral dimension of journalism go any deeper than the pep talks on First Amendment rights and such that Lou Grant served up back at WJM...

...Since the movie proper appears to be set in the present, it must be assumed that the tag takes us into the mid-1990s...

...Terms of Endearment showed us, and Broadcast News reminds us...

...of Saturn rockets and space capsules, did I believe that Jack Nicholson was an ex-astronaut...

...thus its magnification into the film's climactic issue lacked impact, to say the least...

...A major turning point comes when Aaron, having been given his big chance to anchor the weekend news, breaks out into a case of flop sweat so bad that within a couple of minutes his face is drenched and his shirt soaked through...

...No, it wants to be a serious comedy—a comedy about Human Relationships, a comedy with Something To Say, a comedy that simultaneously makes you think, makes you laugh till your sides split, and makes you feel warm all over...

...As in a sitcom, the dramatic complications and resolutions in Terms seemed not to have been coaxed delicately and sensitively out of the inner truth of the characters and the inner logic of the story, but to have been hammered out over bagels and cream cheese by half a dozen comedy writers...

...And young Tom is a likable C-student who, as he explains to his dad, gets by on his great looks...

...nor did I believe in Debra Winger's sudden fatal illness...

...It's too glib, too exaggerated...

...Jane is astonished and scandalized—a reaction which is downright ridiculous, since TV news cutaways are routinely faked...

...It's a funny sequence, yet it wants also to be taken seriously as stating a grim truth about the American media...

...Though the actor who plays young Tom is only average-looking, we're apparently meant to take this self-desby Bruce Bawer cription at face value...

...then it happens...

...A segment producer for the news division of a Washington, D.C., network affiliate, Jane is introduced in medias res at a TV news convention, where she's delivering a heartfelt speech about the need for more substantial news programs...

...Brooks struck sitcom gold with that series, and this time out he's very consciously working the same vein...

...As for William Hurt, he proves to be so frighteningly believable as a dimwit that one feels as if one should take another, more careful look at his previous work...

...The lesson of Terms was that James L. Brooks doesn't know enough to stay out of the sun...

...Brooks does this at the beginning of Broadcast News, and simultaneously establishes that the film will be governed by a sitcom mentality...

...Winger, rather than dying of cancer, might just as convincingly have thrown herself under a train, gone into est, or taken up with a lesbian nun...