late to the party, as always
Wow.
Sometimes you can recognize a killer script a mile off. While I admit that knowing the reputation of Sidney Lumet's Network for years before seeing it didn't hurt, it was the opening dialogue, between two drunken newsman friends, that caught my attention. Max (William Holden)'s joke: in his early days as a reporter he was late to a televised report on the George Washington Bridge, having been told of it only at the last second, so Max ran out in the night in his pajamas and an overcoat and asked a cabbie to take him to the middle of the bridge. The cabbie turned to him and deplored him, "Don't do it, buddy! You're young, you've got your whole life ahead of you!" I didn't know (exactly) where the story would actually go -- I knew it was about network television, I knew it was scathing, and I knew Peter Finch would eventually yell out, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" But from this joke, I knew something else. This was a story about life and death, equating work (and television) with both of those things. This was a story with a gallows humor about the decline that the opening voiceover informed us the story was catching up with.
Mostly Network feels like an actor's dream. It's all heart-blistering monologues and carefully melodramatic scenes of breakdowns, diatribes, sparring matches and vitriolic sputterings. It plays out a bit like a stage play, driven by dialogue more than action or performance, but it makes up for it by being so good. It's so fucking smart, and so fucking big, taking on philosophy, politics, and the media -- from so many different angles it's hard now to keep them all straight -- without ever missing a dramatic beat. And the performances in this really are pretty fucking solid. Faye Dunaway has at least two simple lines that blow her Chinatown performance away (and I'm a huge Chinatown fan). For the record, the two that stick out are: in response to "Do you and Schumacher have a thing?" she simply says "Not anymore;" and much later when Max is on his way out the door, in the middle of a heated argument in which she telling him to go, he tells her he's her only connection to humanity and she does a complete one-eighty, responding with the, "Then don't leave." It's one of the most powerfully vulnerable things I think I've ever seen in a film. It doesn't hurt that the emotions and drama are ramped up full-notch in every scene (love love love Ned Beatty's god impersonation as a way of getting through to crazy Peter Finch, both for its performance and for its strengthening of themes).
I could go on all night. If I had to make one criticism, I think the film would have been much stronger without the nailing-the-point-home voiceover narrator who came in between acts to let us know how things were going. Everything he said was just reiterated in the preceding or following scenes. I'd love to see every frame exactly the same but that voiceover pulled, personally.
But otherwise: man, this movie kicks my ass. I can't believe that 32 years ago -- before I was fucking born -- all of the political and societal shortcomings I still feel need addressing in our society were already there, already being eloquently and explicitly called out, in an Oscar-winning high-profile film that everybody and their mothers have seen, and still we sit and bitch and moan about it. Everything is all right there in the script. Characters flat out say it in exciting, charging, even amusing monologues. (Boy, if I ever wanted proof that movies can't change people's minds, I guess this is it.)
It's rare a film excites me like this on first viewing. Other films I reacted this immediately to that I can think of are The Big Sleep and Chinatown, and... I don't know. Naked Lunch. Maybe Fight Club and Seven, I guess. Chungking Express. I guess I can safely add Lost Highway, Dr. Strangelove, Eternal Sunshine, and maybe Magnolia.
All those guys, and Network.
Oh, and P.S.: one of the followers of the reactionary group (and gunmen at the end) is a young, Jewfro-sportin' Tim Robbins. Ha, awesome.