Broadcast News
What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams? / Keep it to yourself.
God, we used to be a great country.
Everything about this film feels true. The foundation, without which nothing matters, is the pitch-perfect triptych of Hunter, Hurt, and Brooks: all three are perfectly cast, perfectly written, and perfectly executed. Every single person in the world has worked with a Jane and an Aaron and a Tom; the movie never flinches in showing us who they really are, both in virtue and in vice, and Brooks is wise enough to resist trope and obvious resolution in favor of a progression that trades satisfaction for honesty.
But around them, an equally impressive orbit. Joan Cusack doing her usual shtick; Jack Nicholson in what feels today like a stunt-casting role that borders on metafiction; sets and dressing details that never feel too outre, and interstitial newsroom scenes (with the exception of a brief and silly Central American soujourn) that feel far less contrived than the usual romantic comedy fare.
I think it is tempting to dwell on the "message" of the movie, and to think about Jane's opening monologue: as someone who grew up with broadcast news firmly in the rear view mirror, the idea of the "advent" of the anchorman and what it did to a serious journalistic praxis is novel, and of course Hunter's character is proven prescient over the forty years that follows. (One is reminded of the ending to Between the Lines, but in that film the folks getting laid off appear to be neither interested nor competent, which of course cannot be said of our protagonists here.)
But this is a film much more interested in the human condition than the newsroom, and while I don't think it ever succeeds quite on marrying the two as neatly as it would like (the workplace is compelling; the characters, dominated by their work, are compelling; I am not sure this symbiosis teaches us much about the way the world works) it does not matter because you leave the theater understanding the world more clearly because you understand these three people in vivid technicolor. Tom and Aaron have found various satisfactions in paths that are still not quite exactly what they wanted; they know it, and you know it. And Jane — god, what a perfect performance from Holly Hunter — is the one who we know is fiercest, is smartest, is bravest, and all we can do is hope that she stops crying.