Handsome William Hurt died last month at 71. We return now to the height of his fame, in the 1980s, to revisit a pair of his films.
BROADCAST NEWS (1987) (A-minus) - A rare smart movie about TV news, this gem features William Hurt as just one cog in a three-person plot machine, doing great battle with Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks in an awkward would-be love triangle.
James L. Brooks -- the TV writer from "Taxi" and "The Simpsons" and director of "Terms of Endearment" -- captures the zeitgeist of the Reagan '80s, most notably shoulder pads and existential angst over the unraveling of journalistic integrity. He pits Hurt's bubble-headed natural-blonde anchorman with Albert Brooks' neurotic curly-haired purist, with Hunter in the middle as the whip-smart, mentally hyper producer who runs rings around everyone.
When Hurt's Tom shows up, Hunter's Jane can't help being attracted to the shallow, dim-witted newcomer, even though Brooks warns her that he "personifies everything that you've been fighting against" in TV news. Tom is drawn to brainy Jane -- "as much as I can like anyone who thinks I'm an asshole."
"Broadcast News" was perhaps one of the earliest films to subvert expectations of the classic romantic comedy, routinely taking things into territory you might not expect. Don't expect a clean narrative arc or a happy or neat ending. Bittersweet was the drug of choice at the time. Aaron and Jane are friends, but he's a nerd who can't hide his romantic yearnings for her. Jane is a complex character, more than just a wacky woman trying to balance her career with a desire to find the man of her dreams. Hunter is both fierce and adorable as she rides the roller-coaster of Jane's talents and emotions. (Extra credit for the casting against type of Jack Nicholson in an extended cameo as the pompous, dour senior anchorman.)
The secret weapon here is James Brooks' incisive, cynical and cheeky script. When a colleague tells her that it must be nice to always be the smartest person in the room, Jane sighs and mutters, genuinely, "No. It's awful." When Aaron tells pal Jane "I'll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time," you get the feeling that Jerry and Elaine from "Seinfeld" are taking notes. And Aaron goes on a diatribe against Tom, surmising that the devil will come not bearing a pitchfork but would take exactly that smarmy, seductive form:
He will be attractive! He'll be nice and helpful. He'll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation. He'll never do an evil thing! He'll never deliberately hurt a living thing. ... He will just bit by little bit lower our standards where they are important. ... And he'll talk about all of us really being salesmen. And he'll get all the great women.
And after another monologue, when he finally vocalizes his obvious love for Jane, Aaron quips: "How do you like that? I buried the lede!" Tom gets a few good lines in, too; he compares Aaron's flop-sweat anchoring performance to "Singin' in the Rain."
And James Brooks knows his way around a newsroom. This is a rare film that is smart -- even if satiric -- about journalism. His set-pieces revolving around deadlines -- especially a giddy scene of Jane talking to Tom through his earpiece to walk him through his first breaking-news event as an anchor -- are snappy and fun. He gets the little things right while expertly presenting the big picture.
ALTERED STATES (1980) (B-minus) - Well, this one did not age well. Written (under a pseudonym) by the estimable Paddy Chayefsky ("Network") and directed by power-hitter Ken Russell ("The Lair of the White Worm"), Hurt takes advantage of his first major role, as a scientist who trips out in his watery sensory-deprivation tank.
The film charges out of the gates testing the viewer's credulity. Granted these are Harvard science wonks, but the dialogue is overstuffed, complicated and stilted, even coming from academic nerds. It is as if Chayefsky is over-excited by the possibilities of the human mind and he is too eager to shove all his ideas out there. Hurt and his co-stars are to be admired for making the interactions at least somewhat plausible.
However, the idea here -- Hurt's Eddie Jessup gets high on his own supply and sits in his isolation box as his own test subject, wherein he begins to travel back to the beginning of time and somehow emerge as a hairy ape -- is patently silly. He has a suffering wife (played by Blair Brown) and two old pals who assist him, one skeptical ("Hill Street Blues'" Charles Haid, here in full Andy Renko hauteur) and one amiable (a remarkably hirsute Bob Balaban).
The main problem is that this is first and foremost the Ken Russell show. He was never shy about splaying his excesses on the screen ("Tommy," "Valentino"), and here, at the dawn of the computer age, he splashes psychedelic images in machine-gun style, sometimes to inadvertent comic effect. Hurt gives it his all (his career would rocket the following year with "Eyewitness" and "Body Heat"), and it is oddly satisfying to see him practically lick his chops at the fresh memory of having rampaged through the streets of Boston and consumed a goat at the zoo. But, ironically, "Altered States" now stands as an argument for not traveling back in time.
No comments:
Post a Comment