Broadcast News (1987)

Director: James L. Brooks

 If you describe a movie to me as being a Hollywood workplace romantic comedy with a love triangle, I probably won't go in expecting to love it. Mostly because it's just a tired formula that Hollywood has done over and over again only because it's a consistent moneymaker and not because there's any artistic merit left in the genre. That's why I was enormously surprised at how much I loved James L. Brooks Broadcast News (also because Brooks himself doesn't have the greatest track record). In this film the workplace is a broadcast news station, but it's more about the people who work in the news than the news itself. But that's why it works. The people provide the emotion, and you get very quickly attached to the characters. There is subtle commentary on the "showbizification" of broadcast news, but the brilliant thing is that it's never broadcasted (pun intended), and instead it's all subtle and fully at the service of the characters.

The three main characters (each played brilliantly by Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks, and William Hurt) are perfectly realized. They each stand for something bigger than themselves, but are still real individuals. Hunter plays a working woman who is successful in her professional life, but struggling in her personal life (think Liz Lemon). As we go through the movie both strands of her professional and personal life are connected together, and at the end of the movie the ethics and principles of her career are actually brought full circle into the romantic conflict in her personal life. It's truly brilliant writing that captures both ideas and emotion. Even though the film is a Hollywood romantic comedy, it still finds a way to be unconventional. You'll find a happy ending in the movie in which things work out to a degree, but it's not the traditional happy ending you would expect. The film makes the statement that while things may not go your way the way you want them to, they will still end up going your way.

Grade: A-