Cassavetes films are agonizing. I've always found them so. I watch them at a rate of about one every three years; it takes that long to absorb one properly, and that long to recover from the experience. They're not agonizing in the way that, say, a Lars von Trier is, or, God forbid, a Gaspar Noe; HIS films set out to be agonizing first and foremost. Cassavetes tortures us not for the sake of sadism but because he has a massive hunger for cutting into life until he finds the gristle of truth. His movies are shaped like nobody else's, incorporating an extraordinary unpredictability, because his first concern is to gaze without flinching at the painful parts of life until unexpected honesties unfold and drop like gifts into our laps. His actors use an improvisatory style and the editing is unusual, often cutting away in the middle of what we would expect to be a much longer scene once the prospect of new truths has drained away from it, or, as in the bar scene in Husbands, staying three times longer with a scene than any other director on the face of the planet would have done. It's excruciating, but, as with any Cassavetes film, by the end of it one feels as if one has had one's old skin peeled away to expose a shiny, new one emerging from beneath the wounds.
Rowlands and Cassavetes are the only couple I've ever fallen in love with. As an actor, I find him so captivating that the only way I can look away from his face is if she is onscreen with him, and then I forget to watch him at all. This began in 1982 when I showed up early for a double feature and accidentally caught the last half hour of Paul Mazursky's Tempest. I knew who they were, of course. I'd seen Rosemary's Baby many times, and she'd just been up for the Oscar for Gloria. But it was Tempest where I watched them interact as husband and wife, and in that last, strange bit of that strange, small movie I saw something in the chemistry between them that made me stay over and watch it in its entirety.
And it IS a strange movie, with moments of utter brilliance competing against others of dismal, horror-show kind of failure, but Gena and John (may I be so affectionate?) are nothing short of stunning together. The thing that's hard to get past, -- the reason it's not for all comers, even Cassavetes fans, -- is that it carries about it a distinct I-Love-New-York-Musical-Theatre pong, a grating thing. The other difficulty, and this is a corollary to the first, is that the clowns (most notably Raul Julia's Calibanos) seem to inhabit an exaggerated, absurd theatricality which only makes sense in a Musical Theatre context. In Julia's defense, after repeated viewings I can say he really put his back into finding the truth in the emotional transitions, and I think no one in the world could have made a truer stab at this impossible task than he did.
But then to the good: Tempest has scenes which rank among my favorite moments in all of cinema. When the architect Phillip Dimitrius (Cassavetes) quits his job after watching his doppelganger jump from the top of a building site. When he tells his wife (Rowlands) that he wants out, a scene which includes a wonderful, merciless rant about everything he hates ("I hate this cat. I hate its face, with those whiskers..."), a rant which might be funny if it wasn't so devastating, and which winds up in the conjuration of a storm, a beautiful moment. The painful, protracted bit in which Dimitrius destroys his wife's (admittedly annoying) musical theatre party by showing up drunk and making a scene; the great part comes after the guests are gone. He falls on his knees in mock apology and she walks right past him, pushing him away by the forehead. The first time I saw it I thought, "This is the first real marriage I've ever seen in a movie." Then there's the long endpiece, the Tango of Forgiveness, in which relations get sorted out if not tied up, and which escapes a tang of the maudlin through its own embrace of the ridiculous and through that perfect emotional tone which Cassavetes and Rowlands seem to find with such astonishing constancy and effortlessness in everything they do.
That's what Opening Night has: excruciating as it is, as the Rowlands character goes through her nervous breakdown very much in public, there's that ebullient end-scene in which the show finally goes on, and we watch the two of them, husband-and-wife actors playing estranged-lover actors playing troubled spouses, improvising in front of a full house and doing it with such warmth, familiarity and plain good fun that it brings the house down. It's a great film, and a spectacular performance by Rowlands.
I could go on, but I won't. Suffice to say that I will watch these two in anything. One day, when they've finally mastered the principles behind time-travel, I'll produce a Reality TV series in which we go back and plant a camera crew in the Cassavetes/Rowlands household, and that will be the only Reality TV show I ever watch.
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