A Season Of Flash And Greed

By RICHARD CORLISS

"What do you think the devil is going to look like if he's around? . . . He will be attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and . . . he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance. Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen. And he'll get all the great women."

-- Aaron Altman in Broadcast News

Standards and practices. It is the TV networks' courtly euphemism for their censorship departments. But it is a dafter delusion, on Broadcast Row or Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue or any other center of American power these days, to think that old-fashioned moral standards have much to do with today's lean, mean, rapier-clean business practices. Does a news organization, like the one in Broadcast News, employ too many talented men and women to keep its profits proud and its corporate raiders on hold? Then it will package the old reliables and promote the young presentables -- including a good-looking network reporter with nothing on his mind but making it. Does an avid stockbroker, like the one in Wall Street, want to make a quick kill? Then he will sell himself to the nearest killer -- a raider who is part Ivan Boesky, more Mephistopheles. Cut a deal with the devil, and you may become him.

White-collar guys with blood under their manicured nails, Tom Grunick (played by William Hurt in Broadcast News) and Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen in Wall Street) are the ring bearers, the genetically streamlined children, of the new amorality. Bud, in his mid-20s, is learning how to wheel and wheedle; Tom, in his mid-30s, already knows how to ingratiate and conquer. Bud does it with long hours and pit-bull doggedness, Tom with his boyish, passive charisma. Both men might tell you that ideals are as passe as peace marches and that the happening disease, the one everyone wants to catch, is designer greed. So who cares that Bud is a bookie in an Armani suit and Tom is a mannequin with an earpiece? Both will go far. And both will be backpacking their films toward Oscar nominations and the top of the Christmas-party chat list.

It has been a strange year for American movies. The most popular films of 1987 have a dark hue: violent policiers (Beverly Hills Cop II, The Untouchables, Lethal Weapon, Stakeout), corrosive Viet Nam memorials (Platoon and Full Metal Jacket), thrillers about sexual anxiety (Fatal Attraction). Steven Spielberg has flown to the dark side of E.T.: in Empire of the Sun a boy goes to war, and nearly goes mad. Even the comedies are cynical. The Secret of My Success got Michael J. Fox into bed with his uncle's wife to help advance his career. The Witches of Eastwick sent Satan to defeat at the caressing hands of three ravishing feminists. This week's predictable hit, Throw Momma from the Train, is a jolly farce about matricide.

At heart, Wall Street and Broadcast News are comedies too, with high energy levels to match their milieus and enough acid wit to recall the sophisticated screwball comedies of the '30s. Wall Street Director Oliver Stone and Co- Author Stanley Weiser (Project X) get their manic mileage from the gaudy argot of today's power brokers, principally one Gordon Gekko, a black knight who proclaims that "greed is good, greed is right, greed works, greed will save the U.S.A." Listen to the art of the boss raider as he works the phones to spear a couple mil in two minutes flat: "Wait for it to head south, then we'll raise the sperm count . . . If it looks as good as on paper, we're in the kill zone . . . Dilute the son of a bitch. I want every orifice in his body flowing red . . . Lunch!? Are you joking? Lunch is for wimps."

As played with reptilian brio by Michael Douglas, he has some of the pile- driving charm of Michael's actor father Kirk in his early gangster roles. As it happens, the lizardly Gekko is a potential father figure for sly Fox; the other is Bud's dad, a working-class hero who is a mechanic at the small airline that Gekko may soon devour. The elder Fox is played by Charlie Sheen's own dad Martin; and to complete the motif, Stone has dedicated Wall Street (as he did Salvador) to his stockbroker father, who died two years ago. The entire film is in fact a ferocious meditation on the dilemma of a son choosing his father. Which one will Bud emulate: the noble failure or the triumphant sleaze?

The outcome is never really in doubt, so streamlined and predictable are the characters. The women in Bud's life are there primarily as temptations. His broker and lawyer pals are either consciences or bad company. The film seems intended as a blend of morality play and classical satire -- Everyman meets Volpone. Stone always comes at you with big dreams and nightmares; he wants the first and last word on every subject he touches, whether Central America (Salvador), Viet Nam (Platoon) or Wall Street. This time he works up a salty sweat to end up nowhere, like a triathlete on a treadmill. But as long as he keeps his players in venal, perpetual motion, it is great scary fun to watch him work out.

Jim Brooks is a subtler creator than Oliver Stone -- 18 years of writing and producing nifty TV shows like Mary Tyler Moore, The Associates and Taxi taught him to coax comedy from character instead of tossing it grenade-like under the viewer's seat, and Tom Grunick is a far subtler creature of malice than Bud or Gekko. But Brooks is agitated about the state of network news. He is unsettled by the marriage of the comely face and the bottom line. He is disturbed by the new big boys on Media Avenue -- not just in the news, and not just in broadcasting -- who believe that ideas are digestible only in 15-second sound bites, that manners and life-styles are matters of life and death, that pictures tell stories better than words, that personalities sell the product known as infotainment. And if facts give way to factoids, if this month's celebrity gets confused with last month's, hey, that's show biz. Covering the toddler-trapped-in-a-well story this October, an NBC reporter clucked sympathetically about poor "little Jessica Hahn."

Tom, that handsome devil of a network reporter, might not know the difference between Jim Bakker's sex pawn and Jessica McClure. He sure doesn't know the difference between millions and billions in a Defense Department cost-overrun story he's working on. But he knows how to shed a calculated tear on-camera during a human-interest interview. In one sense, Tom is the reverse of Bud Fox: he isn't bright, but he's smart -- smart enough to use his looks and his nice, helpful, attractive attitude to get intelligent people to push him toward stardom, so that they connive in the erosion of their ideals. He is the ultimate salesman and, Brooks suggests, the ultimate news product.

And he gets all the great women. One, anyway: Jane Craig, daredevil news producer. Jane (Holly Hunter) is so focused that even her sobbing fits are controlled; she performs them each morning like aerobics. She is properly repelled by Tom, and improperly attracted to him. Improperly, because she has a perfect pal -- not a soul mate exactly, but a brain mate -- in Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), a warm, supercompetent, underappreciated reporter, the Jimmy Olsen of Mensa. Aaron can spit out pertinent facts about Gaddafi, he can get drunk and sing along in flawless French to a Francis Cabrel tune, he can love Jane to pristine pieces, all to no avail. Poor Aaron. He lacks what this judicious, irresistible romantic comedy is about: the fatal attraction of star quality.

All the performers are tops, from Jack Nicholson as the sour, imposing anchorman who strides through a newsroom decimated by layoffs muttering, "and all because they couldn't program Wednesday nights," to the three principals. Actor-Auteur Albert Brooks (who cast Jim Brooks -- no relation -- in his own second film, Modern Romance) is the all-time appealing schlemiel, notably in a laugh-nightmare when he anchors the network news and sweats his career down the tubes. (Says one appalled technician: "This is more than Nixon ever sweated.") Hurt is neat too, never standing safely outside his character, always allowing Tom to find the humor in his too-rapid success, locating a dimness behind his eyes when Tom is asked a tough question -- and for Tom, poor soulless sensation-to-be, all questions are tough ones. As for Hunter, she graduates with honors from off-Broadway (The Miss Firecracker Contest) and off-Hollywood (Raising Arizona) to fill the center of this demanding movie with cracker charm and elfin steel. Hail, Holly: daredevil actress.

As the premiere sitcom Svengali, Jim Brooks knows how to create characters an audience can fall in love with. But on a TV series, relationships are never resolved; they are just continued next week. So Brooks concludes Broadcast News with a sitcom ellipsis, not a movie exclamation point. The movie ends, like the '80s perhaps, in resignation and anticlimax. Maybe no one believes in happy endings anymore, or even in endings. Maybe, after Bakker and Hart and Iranamuck, people are too cynical to care who gets the girl. But it is good to know that craftsmen like Brooks can create compelling, pertinent folks like Jane, Aaron and Tom. Can we hope that they will spin off into their own high sitcom? That would give us something, at least, to look forward to in the '90s.