Sidney Lumet’s television satire is funny, disturbing and acted with enough conviction to make its excesses plausible. The speeches can crowd out the people, but Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway keep us watching.
Sidney Lumet’s Network is a fierce, funny television satire, and we recommend it with one reservation: the speeches sometimes get the better of the people delivering them. Paddy Chayefsky takes the conversion of news into entertainment and follows the commercial reasoning until it becomes appalling. A broadcaster’s distress can be useful if enough people want to watch it. The film’s strength is the conviction with which it makes that calculation seem professionally sensible.
Howard Beale gives that calculation a human cost, though Peter Finch is far too entertaining to let us feel safely disapproving. We were disturbed by how funny we found Howard Beale’s distress. Peter Finch puts such force into the anger that we understand the temptation to treat it as a performance and forget the man having it. Sidney Lumet allows that discomfort to remain, making our enjoyment of the outbursts part of what troubles us about their exploitation.
Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen is just as important, because Faye Dunaway gives the pursuit of success an energy that is enjoyable in itself. She helps explain how the business keeps going without requiring everybody inside it to regard themselves as wicked. William Holden gives the film a less excitable presence, and his gravity matters when the dialogue threatens to become a competition in eloquence. Robert Duvall’s Frank Hackett adds another forceful personality to an ensemble in which nobody appears inclined to yield.
The visual assurance of cinematographer Owen Roizman and production designer Philip Rosenberg matters here, because a satire this heated needs some restraint around its actors. We believe in this television business even when Paddy Chayefsky pushes its behaviour towards the absurd. Alan Heim’s editing gives the verbal exchanges the pace they need, although speed cannot always disguise how much each speech has been asked to contain. Elliot Lawrence’s music makes less of an impression than the delivery of the dialogue, which seems right for a film with this much to say. The craft is controlled enough to accommodate some extravagant acting.
Paddy Chayefsky is less disciplined about how many targets he wants to hit. Television’s appetite for viewers is already a substantial subject, but the script keeps widening its complaints until some characters seem to have been handed responsibility for an entire social problem. The writing is often funny enough to get away with this. It is also sometimes so pleased with a denunciation that we begin waiting for someone else to speak.
Much of the praise for Network rests on its ability to anticipate what news might become. We think that gives insufficient credit to its immediate pleasures: the performances, the argumentative dialogue and the unpleasant laughter need no subsequent history to justify them. As corporate satire, it is especially effective at making appalling decisions sound like ordinary business. Its broader complaints are less persuasive, particularly when the screenplay expects the force of a speech to do the work of examining a person.
At 122 minutes, it gives its anger time to become wearing, and a little more patience with its characters would have helped. Yet the cast keeps finding feeling inside all that fluent complaint, particularly Peter Finch, whose performance prevents Howard Beale from becoming merely an example of television’s failings. Save it for an evening when you have the energy for people who refuse to stop talking.
