Beatrice Straight won the Oscar from her only nomination for her performance as Louise Schumacher in Network.
Network is a brilliant film about a television network that decides to exploit a former anchor's ravings and outbursts for its own profit, turning him into an icon. It's an absolutely amazing movie that finds its biggest strengths in the acting and its terrific, intelligent screenplay that manages to stop short of turning the satire into parody. I don't even think it's flawless - there are a couple of moments that are a bit poorly shot in my opinion and the subplot about the Ecumenical Liberation Army is a bit heavy-handed - but still the good aspects of the movie are so great that they easily overshadow the few minor flaws. It's a movie that completely lives up to its reputation.
Beatrice Straight's performance is particularly famous for being the shortest performance to ever win an Oscar. And indeed, with little more than 5 minutes of screen-time and overall three scenes, two of which are extremely brief, it is a very small role. Her first scene is not a big one or even a truly important one for the character: we see Louise getting out of bed and finding out that her husband's (William Holden) friend, Howard Beale (Peter Finch), has left the house at night. It's just a very small scene and technically Straight doesn't do much in it, but nonetheless she manages to give us some clues about Louise: we certainly can see she loves her husband and she appears as an intelligent and caring woman. She doesn't seem to be doing anything special but this first scene of hers actually amplifies the impact of her big scene later on. Her second scene barely counts as we just see her from the back as she watches TV.
Her big scene comes in the second half of the movie, when her husband Max confesses his infidelity to Louise and leaves her. What Beatrice Straight manages to accomplish in this single scene is something absolutely astonishing - Louise is not a very original character, and even the scene itself is technically something we've already seen: but rarely such a scene has been portrayed with the same amount of rawness and viscerality as this was. Straight is excellent in this scene as in just a few minutes she has to display a rather extreme range of emotions, from anger to desperation to finally acceptance, and she does it exceptionally: at the beginning, Straight is terrific as you can see Louise's heart breaking but at the same time she tries to mantain a rather calm and dignified façade; as the scene progresses, I love how she becomes gradually becomes more aggressive until Max finally admits he is in love with Diana (Faye Dunaway): then she delivers a brilliant, devastating monologue that Straight delivers with an incredible amount of both fury and grief. I actually don't think that the scene itself is perfect as I kind of hate how the camera often focuses on Holden and not on Straight, even as she delivers her monologue, but Straight's acting is nothing short of astonishing - she conveys 25 years of marriage in just a few moments and even if Holden and Straight barely shared the screen together previously it feels as if we had already seen a movie just about the two of them, as if we truly knew the characters and their history. In a movie like Network, where basically every character is soulless or insane or both, Beatrice Straight's Louise becomes the emotional center of the whole story and the fact that the movie around her is so rid of humanity only makes her single big scene stand out even more - her scene in the movie is simply unforgettable and absolutely necessary because it reminds us that among people like Diana and Frank (Robert Duvall) there are also people that care and that have feelings. Her final moments in the scene are much subtler and equally outstanding: I love that slight, empathetic smile on her face as she listents to Max talking about the affair and her very last moment when she softly puts her hand on his face and tells him that Diana is going to make him suffer is a touching closure for the character.
This is a brief performance but Beatrice Straight completely manages to defy the limitations of the script by delivering an emotional powerhouse: her Louise is the movie's conscience and emotional crux because of the humanity and honesty of her portrayal that constrast so beautifully against the other characters in the movie. It's a wonderful, poignant performance that goes far beyond what was required and left me wanting more of her while still making her work feel whole. An unusual choice for an Oscar, but a great one as well.
4.5/5
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