Seminal to the world of Seventies maverick moviemaking: Deceased Artiste Gena Rowlands

Gena Rowlands was the very heart of John Cassavetes' cinema. She played other great roles on stage, screen, and on TV, but the six films she made with her first husband (she has had a second husband since 2012) will always be her defining works. 

Wim Wenders has said that she is one of the few actresses who could believably cry on-camera (on the level of Setsuko Hara, from the Ozu films), and she certainly could deliver dialogue like no one else. Of the six films, Woman Under the Influence is rightly considered her best-ever film performance. She physically inhabited the roles Cassavetes created for her, but it was also the dialogue that he wrote for her (which he allowed her to change, since he said she knew her characters better than he did) that lingers so long after the film is over. 

Rowlands in Faces.

Here in Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), Cassavetes has her talk about movies "lying" to their women viewers by presenting ideal men, men that don't exist, and giving women ideas on how to live. True to Cassavetes' style, he cuts the monologue before it properly concludes, but by then the message has been delivered (one that he will toy with himself later in the film — this speech is a "key" to the whole picture and its charming but highly unlikely happy ending).

And again, Gena proved to be (despite all of our love for Gazzara, Falk, Lynn Carlin, Ben Carruthers, and Seymour Cassel) the most essential performer in the most essential Cassavetes films.

 

Woman Under the Influence (1974) is indeed Cassavetes’ masterwork, and despite his pared-down visuals, the reason the film hits so hard is because of the lead performances by Rowlands and Falk. Several scenes in the film linger in the memory, but one that cannot be forgotten is the one where Rowlands’ character Mabel is having a breakdown in front of her family (including her really nasty stepmother, played by Cassavetes’ real-life mother) and her doctor. 

The scene is grueling because of our affection for these characters, but also because Falk’s character thinks he can snap her out of her condition and discovers that isn’t possible. Some viewers have found the scene difficult to sit through, and it is. But it’s the essence of Cassavetes’ art that we live through the happy moments in the characters’ lives and also must go through some of their worst moments. 

This particular clip is just the beginning of the breakdown sequence. I definitely suggest watching the entire movie if you can deal with truly “adult” cinema — having nothing to do with sex and everything to do with maturity.

 

One other moment that is utterly unforgettable from the Cassavetes films starring Rowlands is this bit from Love Streams (1984), in which Rowlands’ psychiatrist is chastising her for her denial that the love between herself and her husband has ended. Seymour Cassel plays the husband; thus Love Streams seems to be a sort-of sequel to Minnie and Moskowitz where the happy ending of the preceding film (“movies set you up,” remember?) is belied by the later unhappiness of the quirky couple. 

The psychiatrist in this scene is intent on getting Rowlands’ character to move on from her dead-end love for her husband. In a perfect Cassavetes blend, his questions seem amusing (telling her to get sex, “I don’t care with whom….”). But her insistence that love is a stream that doesn’t end is heartbreaking for the very reason that we’ve *all* felt that way about someone who no longer felt that way about us. It’s the universality of the characters’ dilemmas in Cassavetes’ films that makes them both so familiar and often somewhat uncomfortable. (But oh so human.)

 

The sequence above is echoed in a later moment in the film — set up as a dream sequence — in which an even more extreme balance is struck between humor and heartbreak, as Rowlands’ character bets her husband and daughter that they will love her again if she can make them laugh. She tries out all kinds of novelty-store comic toys on them, and the husband and daughter do not react. Cassavetes’ cinema of “discomfort” is so emotionally driven that even when it is fantasy-based, it is exceedingly familiar. 

Those are the three scenes that show Rowlands off to best advantage (with the caveat that the clip from Woman above is actually only the early part of what is a much longer, more intense scene). As a bonus I will include a sliver here from my phone interview, presented on the Funhouse TV show, with Rowlands and Seymour Cassel, on the occasion of the first release of Shadows and Faces on home video.