The Singular Gena Rowlands
And Mabel and Minnie and Gloria
My mother took me to see A Woman Under the Influence when I was a child - far too young to see or understand it. But it was the 1970s, when kids had to take care of themselves and were expected to be mini-adults, while adults acted, far too frequently, like kids or were simply absent. (See Licorice Pizza for an example of this.) I may have been too young, but I knew I was seeing something exceptional. I recognized the craziness. It was familiar.
Gena Rowlands died a few days ago, and since her death, I have noticed - more proof that I am the Ancient Mariner - how many younger people are talking about her role as a woman with Alzheimer’s in The Notebook. Now, The Notebook is lovely and it made me weep and cry. I watched it with my extremely sentimental oldest brother, who also sobbed. Plus, it has Rowlands and James Garner - I’ll watch Rockford in anything. Rowlands struggled with Alzheimer’s for the last years of her life, making the movie - in which she was directed by her son - a fixation for obituary writers.
But she had a long career - television, stage, film - and anyone interested in Rowlands should start by taking a look at the work she did with her husband, John Cassavetes, directing and writing. I have watched A Woman Under the Influence as an adult and while I generally don’t get irked about silly things like Academy Awards, it does seem wildly criminal to me that Rowlands as Mabel Longhetti did not take home the statue. Martin Scorsese called it the greatest screen performance by an actress since Falconetti as Joan of Arc.
Rowlands’ Mabel is an exhausting and exhilarating woman to watch, in an exhausting and exhilarating film. Like all Cassavetes offerings, it is too long and almost defiantly, deliberately amateurish - he was like that, and proud of it, but in this case it worked. Rowlands as Mabel is desperate and twitchy and angry and beautifully nutty and Peter Falk, as her husband, is clearly in love with her but hapless at how to handle his disintegrating domestic situation - he’s a little off, as well. Perhaps he should just accept it, the last scene seems to say. This is who they are. They love each other. Some have tried to interpret Influence as a feminist statement, anti-marriage or “patriarchy,” but I don’t see it that way. I think that is projection. It is a story about addictions. Cassavetes was an alcoholic who died of cirrhosis, and I can’t help but feel that Mabel is his proxy here. It is also a story about mental health, about twisting yourself into pretzel shapes for others. As Rowlands said, it is about only seeing yourself through the eyes of the person you love. It is, at its core, about love.
Cassavetes once said that all he was interested in was love and it shows here. He was not political or preachy in his work - possibly what I like most about him - and he seemed to understand that the world was designed to make us all insane. Some critics have accused him of misogyny (maybe after seeing Husbands, which I wrote about here) but I think they are wrong. I see deep sensitivity to women and a full admission of how awful men can be, and of how lost they would be without their wives, of how rarely they will admit as much. I’ve always said that you should never trust a man with a Women’s Studies degree - I prefer a Cassavetes over a fake feminist any day. He was certainly a man of his time - watch him, Falk and Ben Gazzara make nuisances and fools of themselves on The Dick Cavett Show. (Dear God, I hope they apologized to Cavett for that.) He definitely had a passion for male friendship, for male bonding. You see it in Husbands, of course, but also in Influence. There is a scene where Falk as Nick - he is a construction foreman - is, with his crew, fixing a massive pipe leak and you see camaraderie, the brotherhood of them in that moment, the hard and important labour of working class men. What they do is more useful than writing a screenplay or a Substack, say. But there is no glory for them and then they go home to more hard work.
Shout out to Falk in this role. There is a scene where he pulls his kids out of school, drags them to the beach and gives them beer - it is an exceptional moment, visceral, and while you are mad at him for this, you feel for him. (This is the kind of thing my father would do - let’s all bow down to the 1970s!) Cassavetes and Rowlands were apparently jarred by the reaction to the film. Rowlands talked in numerous interviews about being stopped on the street by people of all ages wanting to talk about their own experiences: “that is my mother’s story,” “that is my family,” “that is my story.”
A while back I wrote about a couple of chick flicks - for lack of a better term, as neither film is fluffy or utterly predictable - I recommend. And here I’d like to add a third to that list, another Rowlands performance with her husband writing and directing. Minnie and Moskowitz is a chick flick, but a Cassavetes chick flick - less than morally or physically perfect characters, ugly streets, violence and an unsteady happy ending. No Nora Ephron to be found in this part of town. Rowlands’ Minnie Moore faces the standard romance movie scenario: she is torn between a sexy, married cad (played by Cassavetes) and Moskowitz, a pure-hearted, rough, desperately-in-need-of-a-makeover parking lot attendant (played by Cassavetes stalwart Seymour Cassel). If Cassavetes has a proxy in all his pictures, my guess is that Moskowitz, with his bravado and mood swings, is it.
Minnie works at an art gallery and, at first, resists the advances of her unrefined knight. He isn’t - in true Hollywood fashion - the guy she dreamed of, but she chooses him. There are dark stops along the way, including a painful blind date that Rowlands and her suitor (Val Avery, another Cassavetes regular) play to embarrassing perfection. Rowlands’ Minnie goes through it all - flattered by his attention, mortified at the “conversation” they have over lunch, she fidgets with her over-sized sunglasses and tries to simultaneously reject and not hurt her date’s feelings. There are hilarious moments. My favourite scene is Minnie and Moskowitz at a restaurant with their mothers, telling them they are to be married. Moskowitz’s mother is played by Cassavetes’ mum, Katherine, who spends most of the get-together telling Minnie she can do better and that her son - he is sitting right there - is a loser.
[Minnie and her sunglasses.]
I have read that Cassavetes was less than enthused about Minnie and Moskowitz, probably because he had studio support for it. He saw himself as the eternal independent, the maverick. A shame if true, because this is a wonderful film. And there are others from the pair that I endorse, in particular Gloria, a neo-noir that earned Rowlands another Oscar nomination. It’s a love story, too, between a woman and a little boy she has to protect. I believe Woody Allen’s Another Woman is her best non-Cassavetes role and I hope Allen’s having (unjustly) become radioactive won’t prevent that film from being included in retrospectives.
Speaking of the vicissitudes of time and tide, I think young people might lose their minds over the relationship dynamics in many - if not all - Cassavetes/Rowlands films. I would urge them to look more deeply into the stories and not worry about the window-dressing. And I’d urge them to appreciate talent. One can’t imagine Rowlands being pretentious, a la method acting, and pretending to be a mobster woman with a gun for six months in order to play Gloria, or living as though she were Mabel and driving everyone around her bonkers. She was a natural actor. Watching her never feels like homework.
***
Cassavetes and Rowlands appeared on separate episodes of their friend Falk’s show Columbo. I want to briefly mention Etude in Black, the episode with Cassavetes, because you can tell he and Falk are having so much fun. This is not to mention the extraordinary cast: Cassavetes is the snooty villain, Blythe Danner (pregnant with Gwyneth Paltrow) is his cheated-on wife, Myrna Loy his mother-in-law. If it shows up in re-runs near you, have a look.