Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, 1981)

After I found Real Life so brilliant, layered and prescient that I scuttled my planned review entirely so I could revisit it first, I insisted on jotting down some thoughts for Albert Brooks' next film, Modern Romance. This proved to be something of a mistake, perhaps, as Brooks' second film has even more human brilliance within its cynical narrative than his previous work of genius. The title of Modern Romance, like that of Real Life, is at once to-the-point and subversively ironic, much like Brooks' brand of humor. It is also a slyly ambitious name, aspiring to serve as a summarizing overview of the status of something as important as the current state of love in society. With Brooks at the wheel, the film earns its title.

Brooks continues to cast himself as someone who works within the filmmaking industry, only this time he's not a hotshot director but an editor-for-hire named Robert Cole. This occupation proves critical, as he spends his days recontextualizing films by deleting obvious lines and adding in perspective-altering cutaways. In his romantic life, however, Bob is ruled by narrow preconceptions fueled by jealousy, and for someone who surely knows about the Kuleshov Effect, he rarely stops to consider that every shred of ostensible evidence he uses to accuse his girlfriend of something has less objective meaning than subjective belief.

We meet Bob in a diner with his girlfriend, Mary (Kathryn Harrold), where he prepares to break up with her as she sighs with obvious familiarity of his mood swings. Brooks' rant is like a Robert Fripp guitar solo: dissonant, scattershot yet honed to laser precision. He can bounce from a long-winded digression about the film he's working on back to the matter at hand with such speed that even the tangents seem calculated to delve into the shared subject of each spiel: him. Brooks would make a great Dmitri Karamazov, constantly spinning off into his isolated, neurotic realms but always returning at a moment's notice to some self-absorbed, jealous screed. As an actor, Brooks is always desirous, desirous of affection, of attention, even of authority he does not seem to feel even as the director, writer and star of his pictures. Mary listens patiently to this self-absorption but has clearly had enough, and she accepts Bob's break-up request yet again, storming out in a justifiable huff. This could be the end of a cleverer-than-most rom-com, but Brooks uses it to kick off a riotous yet torturous look into the dynamics of relationships in the wake of the sexual revolution.

Brooks is brilliant at playing characters with clearly defined emotional goals — get the girl, make a name for himself, rescue his clownfish son — but hopelessly entangled paths to those destinations, paths he himself mucks up. For 90 minutes, he alternates between hopeless desire for Mary and rejection of her perceived flaws. For a good half of the film, she is not even present for these oscillations of devotion. One is tempted to label Bob bipolar, but even that term implies some sense of transition. Instead, Bob exists in a state of perpetual calm and chaotic despair, always happy for finally ending a relationship he contends never worked but fussing over wanting to reconcile and preventing himself from dating anyone else. Or, of course, letting anyone else see Mary.

Without getting on a soapbox of old-fashioned values, Brooks positions this tumultuous, microcosmic modern relationship as the result of founding a partnership on sex alone. Bob, pouring his heart out to his assistant editor, Jay, summarizes his time with Mary: "We fought and fought, then we had great sex. We never really could talk." Without missing a beat, Jay asks, "Do you need to talk?" It's a funny, typical response, but it shows how blind adults are to the difference between communication and sex. Having emerged from a more repressive system that placed sex on a pedestal, these people continue to view it as the ultimate prize, and hey, if you're getting laid, what more do you want?

Adrift in a time that isn't nearly as sexually liberated as his generation has been led to believe, Bob perpetuates old gender dynamics in a yuppie world. Men may no longer be able to get away with physical abuse, but Bob can still torment Mary with his uncontrollable jealousy, which he likes to believe is a show of his devotion. He calls her workplace and rants when the person at the other end says she's with a client or a colleague, and when his friends ask if they might be allowed to take Mary out themselves, his spittle could burn through metal as he hisses such hysterical, nonsensical insults like "Why don't you go live in an ash can?" And though Brooks maintains a look of general, if horrible, calm on his face, his aggression comes out in subtle ways, such as the casual way he nearly punches his radio buttons when love songs come on each station as he angrily changes channels without his facial expression ever changing. When he manages to worm his way back in with Mary, he immediately starts fighting again, engaging in passive-aggressive behavior when she leaves in dresses he finds too revealing. "There's people who only rape. That's all they do," Bob says in a sing-song voice that gets laughs but doesn't gloss over how insane he's acting.

This is a modern man, who tries to appear even more modern by covering his pain with yuppie hobbies like jogging and a sudden shift to health-freak eating (wherever he goes, he tells salesmen that he's just broken up, and one can see them physically trying to restrain their eyeballs from swiveling to reveal dollar signs where the irises should be). And yet, this modern yuppie has less insight into a stable, mutually beneficial relationship than his mother, who calls a disinterested Bob and retorts her son's comment about him having nothing in common with Mary by noting that couples have to work to find things in common instead of just expecting to find someone who share's all one's likes. Underlining what a regressive brute he really is, Bob stands outside a phone booth waiting to call yet again to see what Mary is doing, but he is forced to wait while a much older gentleman calls his own wife and accuses her of sleeping around to fit his own demented fantasies.

But even with his ability to juggle these dark impulses within the comedy, Brooks does lighten up from time to time and throws in a few raucously written and ingeniously directed sequences to let the audience vent some discomfort. When Bob takes out another woman on a date, the camera points through the windshield as they drive for a time, the gentle music on the radio setting a mood of ease and progression for the hung-up man. Then the camera cuts to show the car returning to the woman's apartment complex where Bob suddenly blurts out that he's "dating too soon" and drops the poor, flummoxed woman off at the curb. Brooks even digresses to spend some time in the editing suite, where he gets in some welcome relief in the form of a director (played James L. Brooks, who would return the favor when Broadcast News came around) who fusses over every extraneous, suspense-spoiling line that Bob and Jay cut and forces Bob to endure all his arty talk about what he wants what appears to be a cheap-ass Star Wars/Star Trek knock-off to mean. Later, the director invites Bob and Mary to a party, where it is obvious that everyone in the room, save Bob, is on coke. And he's still the most high-strung person there.

But the best part of the film, occurring near the beginning, is a night alone spent with a pet bird, a telephone that probably should have been disconnected and a couple of Quaaludes. Brooks turns the scene into a hysterical, yet poignant and realistic, portrait of a person trying to get through a bad night with substances. Brooks slurs and stumbles his way around his apartment, calling friends to profess love both Platonic and romantic, dancing to music he angrily throws off his turntable a few seconds later. A colleague calls and praises Mary, only for Bob to awkwardly mention the break-up, which leads to the aforementioned spew of hatred when the man then asks if he can make a move. "That is incestuous!" Bob yells with fading coherence.

A keen sense of irony hangs over Modern Romance, from the use of "You Are So Beautiful" over the title credits after the opening fight to the "Where are they now?" text crawl that completely undermines the deliberately false optimism and resolution of the film's ending. Yet the one area where Brooks is surprisingly sincere is in his openly acknowledged delineation between "movie love" and "real love." People say such things in the movies all the time, but that doesn't stop them from having the very same pat endings they critique. Technically, even this film has one of those conclusions. But Brooks sets out to make Modern Romance a genuine overview of the romantic relationship in social transition, a transition that, even today, does not yet look to have reached its unknown destination. Even when Brooks gives us our happy ending, he makes it seem hollow before the text informs us this roller coaster kept traveling its ups and downs. This is a complex situation, and it's no wonder "movie love" shies away from it. But as Modern Romance proves, real love can make for much more engaging, brilliant cinema than the easy way out.

Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987)

None of James L. Brooks' films condense his sitcom sensibilities better than Broadcast News. Where so many of his movies feel treacly and thin, Broadcast News offers a well-rounded portrait of fully realized characters whose story does not overstay its welcome. That's the other thing: were it any longer, or were it a television series instead of a one-off movie, the archetypes Holly Hunter, William Hurt and Albert Brooks embody might have consumed them and left only two-dimensional cut-outs for easy humor that turned stale in short order. Somehow, Brooks positions the film perfectly in the middle, clearly drawing upon his television outlook but making something uniquely filmic out of the material.

Using his stint as an CBS News writer as the basis for the film, Brooks casts a spotlight on the news industry in flux. Television has become the dominant means of news communication, and Brooks looks into the medium shortly before the likes of CNN completely altered the format from individual news programs to a 24-hour machine. At times, though, one can hardly tell that the characters only produce news for an hour-long (if that) block of programming, as the Washington newsroom bustles at all times with people desperately trying to get segments finished on-time and watching playbacks with fervent hope that the lead anchor up in New York, a godly presence appropriately played by Jack Nicholson, will give even the slightest indication of approval.

For cynical journalism majors like myself, Broadcast News offers not just an accurate view of TV news in the '80s but a disturbingly prescient view of the ethical shift in journalism in the modern age. Or perhaps that's the wrong way to put it: as the jumpy Blair (Joan Cusack) tells the network's news president, newspapers hunt readers as viciously as TV seeks viewers. Two of the three main characters, the gifted but overly acerbic reporter Aaron (Albert Brooks) and the blunt producer Jane (Holly Hunter), constantly rail against TV news, though they not only work in the profession but even cut video segments for calculated impact.

It's better, then, to say that Broadcast News shows the changing face of that ratings grab, moving away from unique story ideas, exclusive interviews and more appealing writing to mere flash. The papers might have their fluff stories, but they'd at least try to have good writers pen them. Now, TV simply requires shiny images to win over the public. At a conference on the state of TV news, Jane rants about the dangers of the modern approach to news as an assembly of colleagues yawn, chatter amongst themselves and even walk out en masse. Flailing, Jane makes one last attempt to prove her point by showing a tape of a meaningless domino display that every network ran instead of covering something serious like nuclear treaty talks. The audience of adults who supposedly entered journalism to spread truth suddenly turn back in delight and even applaud the video of cascading, colorful dominoes.

Now, any idiot can tell the news, a change in broadcasting personified by Tom (William Hurt), a sports anchor looking to make it big despite his lack of education, experience or even basic intelligence. Hurt's performance is perhaps his finest: from the second he walks up admiringly to Jane in the aftermath of her disastrous address, he communicates utter stupidity in his eyes. Before he even opens his mouth, his beaming, empty smile gives him away, and sure enough, he soon proves himself an idiot, albeit one with as much ambition as either Jane or Aaron. Crucially, however, Tom knows he's a dolt with no understanding of news, and Hurt plays him with an earnest desire to learn and get ahead that gives dimension to what might otherwise have been a one-trick prop. That complexity also allows the audience to buy, however reluctantly, that Jane would so quickly fall in love with him though she knows he represents everything she hates.

Brilliantly, Brooks weaves together two distinct threads, the love triangle between Jane, Tom and Aaron (who's been Jane's best friend for years but cannot come out and say how much he loves her) and the workplace satire of the newsroom, into one unified narrative. The professional mixes with the political: Tom's rapid ascension within the network mirroring Jane's conflicting feelings of love and repulsion, while that personal turmoil tugging at Jane fleshes out her professional behavior as a blunt, almost aggressive ringleader. Some of the film's finest scenes perfectly encapsulate Brooks' deft handling of the two plots; Tom's first time in the anchor's chair necessitates complete planning by Jane to prevent his inanity from slipping out, and Brooks films the resulting broadcast from behind the scenes, showing how Tom's charisma filters Jane's instructions, most of which come from Aaron's wide base of knowledge on key news topics. In essence, we see the triangle played out through a completely professional prism: Aaron, unable not to help and support his friend and love, assists her in making Tom look good, which only makes him more attractive to her, and Tom's own elation at succeeding draws him closer to Jane.

At every turn, this feels like a James L. Brooks film, but at times I wondered if the other Brooks involved did some punch-up. Albert Brooks gives such an impeccable, completely A. Brooksian performance as Aaron that part of me refused to believe he was reading someone else's lines. Albert Brooks directs the comedian's own cynicism against himself, positioning Aaron's hostile wit as an outgrowth of his pain over Jane's strictly Platonic view of him. Anyone who has ever been in the "friend zone" with a pal you'd give anything to be more than a friend will find Brooks' performance acutely, almost unwatchably real. He tries to drop hints to Jane, asking with wistful neurosis, "Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If needy were a turn-on?" Aaron makes one final, desperate appeal for Jane with a monologue that mixes the best of both Brookses: in a fit of pique, Aaron unleashes a half-series rant on how Tom is the devil, expounding on the idea that Satan is always attractive, kind and unassuming, but that he subtly tears down everything until all that's left is misery and chaos. It's a hilarious outburst, but also one that mingles not only the same personal and professional concerns simultaneously weighing on these characters but Aaron's biting sarcasm and genuine agony over losing Jane. And when, after so much waffling, Aaron finally admits his love for Jane, I was so happy Albert Brooks got the part, as no one else could have sold the line, "How do ya like that? I buried the lead" with infinite heartbreak and bitter resignation instead of snappy punnery.

But no one compares to Hunter. Jonathan Rosenbaum said Jane was "the most intricately layered portrait of a career woman that contemporary Hollywood has given us," and that seems the best summary of her character. Hunter has to walk a fine line, portraying a career-driven woman who also longs for a relationship without falling into the numerous stereotypical pitfalls that await nearly all depictions of such characters in Hollywood. But Hunter pulls it off; rather than play Jane as bitchy, Hunter brings out the social awkwardness and stress of Jane and how her work is both the cause and product of these traits. Hunter is a hilarious crier—she pulls her whole face back as if trying to squeeze her tear ducts shut, afraid that tears might give her away only to end up a moaning, warped wreck who looks like she's having a seizure—but her comically exaggerated sobs belie a wracked misery of the incessant demands of her job and the feelings for Tom she wishes to suppress and further explore. Brooks didn't write Jane to be simply the opposite of the stereotypes but to delve into the complex emotions that ultimately settle into broad types.

For all its written and even physical comedy, Broadcast News hits hardest when it lets its triumvirate subsume the commentary into their deeply felt drama. A journalistic strand of pessimism hangs over the whole affair—when a professionally and personally satisfied Tom good-naturedly asks Aaron "What do you do when real life exceeds your wildest dreams?" Aaron hisses back "Keep it to yourself." Some might consider that dour view to extend to the coda, placed seven years into the future and settling the love triangle in a way sure to please no one. Yet the ending deals with the very cinematic construction of the rom-com love triangle in a very earthly, relatable way: love doesn't exist in a vacuum, and the same careers that help and hinder the advances of the three continue to affect their personal lives. Admittedly, I wanted the pat ending, if only because Albert Brooks reminded so much of a personal crush I had on a friend that years later I'd still settle for a facile vicarious victory. But the real, human conclusion to the film only cements it as Brooks' best, funniest yet most poignant movie, and the best journalism movie to say something about more than just the occupation.