I’ve mentioned a few times that I am trying to fill in all the blanks on my Fill-In Filmography poster, and while many of the movies on there have been some interesting treats I might not have looked up otherwise, and there are one or two I have basically resolved to never watch, I have to say I do not get how this poster was organized. The upper left section is supposed to be dramas, but that includes romances, and the biggest section in the romances is for romantic comedies. Other movies seem to pop up in all kinds of places. I mean, I don’t think there’s a single Wes Anderson movie on that poster in the comedy section. They’re scattered all over the place.
Which is to say I watched director James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News, and while I could call it a lot of things, it certainly isn’t a drama.
Broadcast News is essentially the story of three people, all seen as children in the opening scenes in ways that tells the audience everything they need to know about them. Tom Grunick (William Hurt) is a handsome man who isn’t all that deep and is clearly anchorman material if he can find the right person to coach him through the tougher times. That person might be Jane Craig (Holly Hunter), a highly principled news producer who hates the rise of soft news stories. Finally, there’s Jane’s best friend Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), a smart and dedicated field reporter who tends to rub people the wrong way. They all work out of the Washington bureau for an unnamed national TV network, and the way that these three interact while the world of TV news goes on all around them is what this movie basically is.
And it mostly works at that. Tom and Jane start to form a tentative romance, one that seems to rely as much on their working relationship as their personal one. Aaron, who also has a thing for Jane, is a man of principal in many ways, and he doesn’t like to see Jane fall in love with a man who is, in many ways, everything she hates about the news business. Jane herself isn’t blind to this fact, but she finds Tom to be fun, and he is a handsome man. As for Tom, while he may not have good instincts for finding stories that are the level of serious that people like Jane want, he isn’t an idiot either. There are things he does know how to do; he just isn’t all that good at digging deep into stories that matter, arguably not really a job for an anchorman in certain respects.
Small note: I want to discuss the ending here. I rarely do that here. I prefer to leave such things out, but the way the movie ended struck me a certain way, and this is a 35 year old movie. So, you’ve been warned. Anyway, the thing that struck me was that in many romcoms, the main couple end the movie together with the implied happily ever after. The other guy/gal in the triangle will maybe get someone of his/her own sometimes if said character was not depicted as the worst person ever. However, Broadcast News ends in a way that says none of these people formed a romantic bond in the end. Jane breaks it off with Tom when she realizes he faked sincerity during a piece, and on a very heavy topic at that, and then the movie jumps forward seven years to a reunion of the three. Tom and Albert talk amicably as Tom is engaged to another woman and Albert has himself gotten married to an unseen wife while bringing along his young son. Jane has an equally unseen boyfriend, and while Jane and Albert really start to catch up, Tom walks away to get dinner with his fiancée. It’s perhaps the rare romcom where the characters all find some level of happiness without any of them getting together, though to be honest, Albert’s declaration of love came late in the movie and probably could have been ignored. I really want more movies and TV shows where men and women can be just friends without anyone being romantically inclined towards the other. That kind of thing happens all the time in the real world.
That said, I think there’s some central irony involved with the fact I watched this off HBO Max before the movie leaves the service at the end of the month. HBO Max has been my favorite streaming service for a while, but since the merger/buyout/whatever between Warner Brothers and Discovery, HBO Max has been rather quietly just dropping stuff with little or no notice while the company itself has been laying people off. Some of those moves, like the decision to scrap a mostly finished Batgirl and a Scoob! sequel have gotten more notice than others, but the idea seems to be the company needs to recoup after some bad financial loses. I’m hoping when all this is done, the service will still have a lot of the things I like on there, especially since I have zero interest in Discovery’s more reality show-based programming. What does this have to do with anything? Well, one of the bigger plot elements in Broadcast News is the network is cutting jobs in the wake of financial lose, and at one point, Jack Nicholson’s visiting network anchorman remarks that the layoffs will be hard, but likewise silently makes it clear he’s not willing to shave a million dollars off his salary to make it less painful. Seeing the layoff and restructuring going on at WB Discovery happening in a 35 year old movie with a high salaried employee making it clear he wouldn’t take a paycut so those lower down can maybe keep their jobs…yeah, that sure did seem familiar to me right now.
Grade: A-
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