Network (1976): The More Things Change ...

Network, winner of four Academy Awards, is a highly polemical satire/comedy about the transformation of broadcast news into infotainment, the evils of corporate hegemony, and the dumbing-down of America. It is one of director Sidney Lumet’s most lauded and remembered films. The film and its trademark rant: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” was the talk of the nation 35 years ago. Sidney Lumet ‘s death a couple of months ago got me interested in revisiting this classic, which I had last seen when it was in general release 35 years ago, to see how it has held up.

Pretty well, I’d say, especially for such a topical, message-oriented motion picture. It remains highly entertaining, outrageous, funny, and thought provoking, though perhaps not quite in the way originally intended. More on that later.
Lumet  (1924 - 2011), although he achieved quite a lot of commercial success,  was/is underrated as a ‘serious’ filmmaker, perhaps because he WAS so successful. Like Network, many of his movies were ‘message’ pictures, such as Fail-Safe ((1964), The Group (1966), Serpico (1973) and The Verdict (1982). “While the goal of all movies is to entertain,” he wrote, “the kind of film in which I believe goes one step further. It compels the spectator to examine one facet or another of his own conscience.” He was wonderful with actors, and worked with some of the greats: Pacino, Fonda, Hepburn, Steiger,  Robards, Brando, Burton, Newman, often bringing out some of their best, most interesting work. Take a look at what he got out of Henry Fonda, Jack Klugman, Martin Balsam, Jack Warden, Lee J. Cobb, and the rest in one of his earliest films, 12 Angry Men (1957), or watch Rod Steiger as Sol Nazerman in the Pawnbroker (1965). Two of Al Pacino’s best roles were directed by Lumet: Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and the title role in Serpico (1973).

The actors in Network do not disappoint. Peter Finch is brilliant in this, his final role, as Howard Beale, an old-school newsman in the Walter Cronkite mold, who, in the twilight of his career and in the wake of declining ratings, abandons his professional restraint and decides to actually tell the “truth” to America. Along the way he is co-opted, manipulated, and exploited by his network and ultimately by the multinational mega-corporation that owns it and – by extension - owns us. Finch’s character rants, raves and ultimately disintegrates as we (and the country) watch.  Finch was posthumously awarded the Oscar for best actor for this performance.

Faye Dunaway explodes as Diana Christiansen - the ambitious, ratings driven network program director who sets this in motion.  She understands that controversy gets people talking; and when people are talking, ratings go up. Content and good taste are immaterial.  So, in addition to promoting  Howard Beale (advertised as the “Mad Prophet of the Airwaves” ) and his evangelical fulminations decrying life in a corporate-run America, Diane produces a new weekly series, the Mao Tse Tung Hour(!), chronicling the exploits of the terrorist “Ecumenical Liberation Army”, all the while paying these radicals a hefty sum for their participation. A prescient foretaste of the  reality shows of today?  Dunaway’s Diana is all energy, talking a mile a minute, obsessed with success. She is beautiful and sexy, but empty, soulless.  I found her hilarious. The role earned Dunaway an Oscar for best actress.

Which brings us to, Max Schumaker (William Holden), another old newsman, the head of the network’s news department, and our narrator. In a nice touch, Holden starts and ends the movie with voiceover narration, just as he did so memorably in Sunset Boulevard.  Max is appalled at the commercialization of TV news shows. Yet, inexplicably, he starts an affair with Diana, who represents the antithesis of all Max stands for, and then he falls in love with her. Or so we are told. Notwithstanding Dunaway’s good looks, she is not someone Max or any other sentient being would want to spend time with in a non-celluloid world.

This plot development does offer some rewards, however, chief among them being the reaction of Max’s wife of 25 years (played by Beatrice Straight), who lets loose a fine dramatic speech (“This is your great winter romance, isn’t it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years. Is that what’s left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion and I get the dotage? … I’m your wife, damn it. And, if you can’t work up a winter passion for me, the least I require is respect and allegiance.“). Her mere five minutes of screen time won her an Oscar for best supporting actress.

Robert Duvall and Ned Beatty are also featured, and are fun to watch; especially Beatty as an evangelical  capitalist.

Paddy Chayevsky, who wrote the screenplay (and received the film’s fourth Oscar for his efforts), must have had it in for the television industry. Network relentlessly, broadly (and pedantically) skewers the shows, the people working on the shows, TV executives, and the corporate interests – owners and advertisers – to whom the rest are beholden. A lot of this remains funny, but the message is trite and the delivery pretty unsubtle today.

Was it surprising in 1976 to discover that TV is largely vacuous? The terms “wasteland” and “boob-tube” had been applied to the medium years earlier. The mid-seventies may have been a low point in television programming – certainly compared to our times, but I suspect, and sort of recall, that this movie’s diatribe about the stupidity of TV-land was recognized as hackneyed even at the time. The concern about the diminishing quality of network news, on the other hand, was a bigger deal.

Debate over the quality of TV news programming continues.(e.g.  the controversy about Katie Couric as an anchor; or about  the partisan biases of Fox News or MSNBC), but with the explosion of Cable and the Internet, it is hard to credibly argue today that people can’t get the information they need. We can and do bemoan the fact that many people are horribly uninformed or misinformed, but this is a critique of our citizenry or of our education establishment, rather than of the TV networks. Indeed, the networks are so diminished in the 21^st century, they hardly seem to matter. 

In the mid-70’s, there were only three primary networks. CNN (created in 1980), Fox News (launched in 1996) and the rest weren’t around yet. There was no world-wide-web.  Newspaper readership had lost a lot of ground to television.  ABC, CBS and NBC were where most people got their news. So the cultural context when Network was made was vastly different from our world. This was why Network was so impactful then, yet seems thematically dated now.

Actually, part of my enjoyment in watching Network now, is that the movie is such a great time capsule of its era.

There was one aspect of Network I really did not like. The film is unrelentingly, annoyingly preachy. Howard Beale sermonizes over and over about how we all have become puppets controlled by faceless, evil corporations. Holden, as Max, tells Diana how, back in the good old days (in his case, the 1950’s), people were smarter and had morals and ideals. Max’s generation has real human feelings and needs, he declares, whereas Diana and her ilk are merely “humanoids.”   Max goes on and on, to all and sundry,  about the younger generation’s obsession with TV, how it is character destroying, life destroying, how people don’t read books anymore.

To my ears, a lot of this sounds like the stuff we are hearing about today’s young people: the computer generation. “They” don’t read anymore, “they” are always online, on their smart phones, iPads, whatever. The technology is dehumanizing.    Ironically, today’s accusations are coming from the generation of folks that Chayefsky and Lumet were deriding or writing off 35 years ago.

The more things change …

Watch Howard Beale's "Mad as hell" speech on YouTube

Network is available on DVD, or streaming  from Netflix.

The Trip (2011): Making Good Impressions

The Trip (not to be confused with the psychedelic 1967 Peter Fonda film of the same name) is a jovially funny and bittersweet picture about two British actors named Steve Coogan (played by Steve Coogan) and Rob Brydon (Rob Brydon also playing himself) who take off on a sponsored trip to the North of England to sample cuisine at several Michelin-starred restaurants. It’s a road movie/buddy movie, a bit like Sideways (2004) in a way, and yet really quite it’s own thing.

If you are looking for a lot of story, or intrigue, or action, this is not your kind of movie. But if you are looking for laughs, droll wit, and a bit of a character study, I can recommend The Trip very highly.

This project started out as a BBC series of six half hour episodes about these two guys on their road trip. (Little bits of this are available on YouTube and elsewhere.) For the film, the running time was edited from 180 minutes down to about 107 minutes. It’s said Coogan and Brydon are playing slightly exaggerated versions of themselves. They’ve previously worked together on a number of projects, most significantly, perhaps, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2006). (That was a film about a group of actors trying to film Lawrence Sterne’s “unfilmable” 18th century satirical novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The novel is purportedly Mr Shandy’s attempt to give the world a complete and totally honest account of his life and opinions, wherein the narrator finds himself so bogged down with the pursuit of comprehensive truth, not to mention digressions galore, that he abandons the enterprise shortly after getting himself born - at page 400 or thereabouts. The film is not so much a depiction of the actual story – to the extent there even was a story - but a free form, and seemingly improvised, depiction of the actors’ doomed attempts to do so.) In that film Coogan and Brydon, again playing themselves, were endlessly competing with and one-upping each other, and so here in The Trip as well.

What makes this picture fun is the actors’ obvious comfort with one another and (notwithstanding some feigned disdain) their enjoyment of one another. As they meander the Lake District in their Land Rover, we get to know them a bit, observing their differences (Coogan is darker and discontented, while Brydon is more secure within himself, seemingly contented with family domesticity). More significantly we can admire their obvious talents, especially their joy in doing impressions of other actors and personalities. Their competitions to do the best Michael Caine impression, or Sean Connery , or even Woody Allen, are amazing and hilarious.

Another bit that cracked me up was the depiction of the (often absurd) efforts of high end kitchens to outdo one another in food preparation and presentation. If I was at any of these places, I’d probably savor every moment, every dish. But the aroma and taste of the exotic preparations doesn’t come across on film. Instead, we see the absurdity of it all. Here’s a little snippet that gives a glimpse of our guys and the cuisine.

Another enjoyable aspect to this movie is the locations. While not worth the price of a ticket for scenic splendour alone, the North country is beautiful to behold.The Trip is also a very quotable film, and I could even see it gaining some kind of cult status..

The director, Michael Winterbottom, is quite eclectic, and has a following. I’d only seen Cock and Bull Story before The Trip, but I’m now anxious to catch up on his other stuff.

The Trip is a small film, the polar opposite of the summer blockbuster. I saw it at the San Francisco International Film Festival last month. It has just been released in New York City, but not yet in the Bay Area. Keep an eye out for it, as it may not be in theaters for long. Or put it on your Netflix list.

Here's the trailer.

Midnight In Paris (2011): C'est Bon!

I like Woody Allen’s European period, what I’ve seen of it. And this may be the best of his recent pictures, certainly up there with Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2009).

Midnight in Paris is a delightful, little light romantic comedy. The romance, however, is not between a man and a woman, but with a time and a place – most especially with the place: an idealized, beautiful Paris. Allen is in love with Paris, and takes us on a lovely, sentimental travelogue through the city. Paris along the Seine, Paris in the rain, boulevards, alleyways, Paris at midnight. I kept smiling to myself as I recognized landmarks, famous and otherwise. Through the magic of the movies, we also get to see this city of lights not only today, but in two of its earlier glorious inceptions: the 1920s Lost Generation era of Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald , Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, et al; and the belle époque period of the late 19th century, of Maxim’s, Tolouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and that lot.

There is a story here, of course, about a Hollywood screenwriter, Gil (Owen Wilson) who has come to Paris with his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), tagging along with her parents on Daddy’s business trip. Gil has had some success in Hollywood and it is a little unclear why he has any need to be freeloading off his in-laws-to-be, but there they are – wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Inez and her family are presented to us as quintessential ugly Americans, who see Paris as a quaint little backwater, albeit with great shops, and who can’t wait to get back to Malibu. Gil, on the other hand, is a dreamer. He just wants to live and breathe Parisian culture, art, food, history. He has fantasies about moving to Paris (don’t we all), setting up in a little apartment, and becoming a ‘real’ writer, like other expatriates before him. Inez thinks he’s nuts, and tells him so. Repeatedly.

As in so many Woody Allen films, we are presented with a classic dysfunctional couple, ill suited to one another, who somehow believe they love one another, even while it is apparent to the rest of us that this just is not going to work. Gil just wants to walk the streets of romantic Paris with his girl, but she’s not having it. There’s a shopping date, a lunch date, a timetable to attend to. Rachel McAdams does a terrific job playing a beautiful woman with a repulsive personality. She is so convincing that I’m crossing her off my cinema girlfriend list (at least until her next picture).

So Inez goes off and does her thing, and Gil sets off to do his. [spoiler alert] Around midnight, Gil finds himself transported back to the world of his dreams – in the company of his idols, the Fitzgeralds (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Cole Porter (Yves Heck), Gertrude Stein (Cathy Bates) and the rest. How this happens is not explained, but we are to believe he’s really there – this is not played as a dream a la Dorothy’s visit to Oz. While at first Gil is astounded, he quickly accepts the situation and then starts to really dig it. And so do we – the caricatures of these writers and artists of legend are quite witty, especially Hemingway, Zelda, and Dali (Adrien Brody). It’s a gimmick but it’s cute.

Gil also meets Picasso’s lover, Adrianna (Marion Cotillard) and is enchanted. She also is attracted to him. Ahhh, some dramatic tension – what about Gil’s engagement (and Adrianna’s connection to Picasso)? I won’t tell, find out for yourself. More significantly, we are privileged to see Ms. Cotillard in a whole new light. I don’t know about you, but I never understood what the big deal about her was. She was good as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose (2007), barely noticeable in Inception (2010); but didn’t project (to my sensibility, anyway) warmth, beauty, or sexual allure in those pictures. Here, however, she gives us all of that, with a dollop of real intelligence to boot. She can take McAdams’ place on the girlfriend list. In any event, Gil is surprised to discover that Adrianna and her contemporaries don’t find their era particularly special. They imagine that times were way cooler back at the turn of the century. There’s a lesson here, of course. Gil figures this out pretty quickly, as do we.

There is not a lot of meat to this film. But it got me thinking. Allen’s sympathies are clearly with his protagonist, with his love affair with Paris, with art, with the fantasies of every sojourner who imagines “what would my life could be like if I settled here?” (wherever ‘here’ is). Who hasn’t thought about relocating to a vacation spot, opening up a little B&B or, perhaps, telecommuting from the beach or the bistro? But after soaking up the local splendor, we always come home. In Midnight In Paris, Gil decides he’s staying in Paris. In fact, he’s a fish out of water there, doesn’t even speak the language, as far as we can tell. His antagonists, Inez and her family and friends, are portrayed as smug and superficial, but they aren’t nincompoops – they go to the museums and historic places, travel to Versailles and even out to Mont Saint Michel, they are clearly well educated people. They shop for antiques, while Gil shops for Cole Porter sheet music. They are living in the real world – albeit a luxurious one – while Gil is living … in his dreams? Is their world so evil, so wrong?

I doubt Woody Allen wants us to question his premise or his protagonist’s choices in this way. As I said at the outset, Midnight In Paris is pretty light entertainment. But it IS entertaining. And Owen Wilson, always a likeable character, really carries this movie. He’s got a great face, always changing. It’s not at all handsome, but it’s always interesting. His sense of wonder, dreaminess, and earnestness are endearing. If you close your eyes, at times he sounds almost like Woody, and of course he is Allen’s alter ego. Like his alter ego, he is attracted to beautiful women, but unlike the Woody Allen character, Wilson’s Gil is comfortable around women and it doesn’t stretch credulity to believe that women are attracted to him. Wilson is also a better actor than Woody Allen.

So, Midnight In Paris gives us sentimentality, romance, fantasy, a moral, food for thought – that’s enough, isn’t it? And it’s a great title.

In current release.      Here's a trailer.