Opening Night

This is the film that nearly broke Cassavetes for good. It played in a single LA theater for a few weeks to empty seats before being shelved, never really opening. People would not have flocked to see it but it must have been dismay that shakes you to your core, to go through all this work and just shelve it at the end. In a few years time it would be playing in MoMA.

Cassavetes' whole project of making films is one of the most fascinating in the medium. We have only tidbits on screen really. The rest is tucked away in the filming process that went into discovering each film. It's in the hours of footage he never used. The four hour versions of Husbands and Woman we'll never see. His struggles to make each one are comparable to Welles, remarkable men both.

The story goes that he was so spent after making Woman that he was never the same again. He had said his piece and in the most pure way possible. Before and after are iterations of the same way of seeing anyway, as is always with makers who have something to impart and don't just show up for work. But he was fervent to keep going: he used the profits from that film to make Chinese Bookie and this out of pocket.

Bookie saw him reflecting on his own place as proprietor of lively improvisations while having to deliver a gangster plot to appease money men. It was not just cynical work. It was a meditative search for a true face from among different masks; suave playboy, entertainer, killer. It continues here, the same business with roles and faces.

As always, actors fumble and fret within the constraints of a story imposed on them. The camera swims as one of them would, as if culled from inside an actor uncertain about his presence, losing and finding again. The whole has that thick, viscous quality I love about him, it demands concentrated staying in that space where nothing is yet decided. This is Cassavetes' room. By this point you'll know whether you like it or not.

This is about an actress asked to go into that room and portray a role: woman pushing forty, childless and unmarried. It's for a play they're preparing for New York out in the sticks. She is all of those things in "real life" so what would make better sense than to portray truthfully?

But this is the whole thing with Cassavetes, why you deserve to have him in your life above all those other filmmakers who mollycoddle you with redemptions. With him truth is something you set out to find by shedding self, it's not handed down by any role and you have to make sure of that. It's what you find after you have stopped tossing the room for it. After words and guises have been peeled back, what is there?

This whole film is about an actress, Rowlands, fighting to shed that self that stands in the way of true expression. The play role expects middle-aged desperation about life, self- pity. Melodrama stuff. But she can't do it, won't. She could tap into those parts of herself but that would be giving into those parts, nurturing them, conceding to be the person the story says you must be.

So she won't do it. People plead with her, cajole, scold or lecture her but nothing does it, she is adamant. It has a few blunt devices along the way: seance and ghost of a younger self. Her refusal to do the sensible thing aggravates. In the all important premiere she finally arrives late and drunk and everyone concedes that it's not going to happen.

All of this ribs on Cassavetes own method of sustained, structured collapse where the point isn't to use actors to convey certainties of drama, it's to use drama to chisel the persons who will live through its effect on them. Whatever that comes to be. It all has to arrive to a point of intense uncertainty. A cessation of thought so that things will be free to mean themselves.

You'll see what he does in the end. It's Cassavetes and Rowlands on a stage in a culmination of a parallel life in which they never married.

It's marvelous. It doesn't really work and you will probably note that he misses. But if you're someone who tries to be the person you truly feel in your heart to be, you will rejoice to see the baring and nothing pretty, sad or redemptive salvaged out of it so we'll applaud. It's the reach that drives it, the transcendent reach for that idea all about masks dropping and having to face yourself bare, and in his reach he is as vast as Tarkovsky.

Many reviews here explain the story and characters of 'Opening Night' in some detail so I won't do that. I just want to add my comment that I believe the film is a wonderful affirmation of life.

At the beginning Myrtle Gordon is remembering how 'easy' it was to act when she was 17, when she had youth and energy and felt she knew the truth. Experience has left her emotionally fragile, wondering what her life has been for and, indeed, if she can even continue living. A tragic accident triggers a personal crisis that almost overwhelms her.

Almost - but not quite. At the eleventh hour she rediscovers the power of her art and reasserts herself ("I'm going to bury that bastard," she says of fellow actor Maurice as she goes on stage). It seems almost sadistic when Myrtle's director prevents people from helping her when she arrives hopelessly drunk for her first performance. He knows, however, that she has to have the guts to make it herself if she is to make it at all.

Some critics wonder if this triumph is just a temporary pause on Myrtle's downward path. I believe this is truly her 'opening night' - she opens like a flower to new possibilities of life and action, she sees a way forward. It is tremendously moving.

Gena Rowlands is superb. The film is superb. Thank you, Mr Cassavetes, wherever you are.

Full of interesting ideas and really rather chilling at times, this account of a mental breakdown is fascinating to watch, with Gena Rowlands a glorious choice for the lead. It is in the way that Rowlands is able to carry emotion on her face that makes her performance so stunning, and along with some well used music and effective close-up photography, it is an intriguing piece of cinema, even if awkwardly very melodramatic at times and a tad hard to digest. The on and off-stage action in the protagonist's life is mixed together, and it is sort of muddled in this sense, though perhaps only as muddled as her mind is. The film poses such interesting questions about how much one should or does care, it portrays mental illness, and, it also has some insight into theatre production. It is very good stuff and only really brought down by being fatally overlong, with the content stretched to its limits.

"Opening Night" released in 1977, tries to be an ambitious production. It succeeds only in the truly stunning performance of Gena Rowlands. Her character of theatre actress Myrtle is not necessarily someone we would love in real life. She is self-absorbed, often obnoxious, and makes life miserable for those around her - in other words, not unlike some actresses! Myrtle is also a woman on the edge of collapse - we are not quite sure if the demons she is fighting are real or imagined, although we are let in on the secret early. Rowlands is obviously well directed with love by her gifted husband, actor/director John Cassavettes, who has a role in the film as well. This film is not without flaws - it is overly long, and the last part of the film where Myrtle goes on stage while very drunk seems almost cruel. The "improvising" in some of the dialogue - at least while on stage - goes on way too long. Some of the supporting characters give good performances, especially from Ben Gazarra, playing Myrtle's sleazy producer. Joan Blondell's character is never fully developed, and I never could figure out why she was in the film, except to placate Myrtle. See this film for Rowlands alone - she is fascinating throughout - and it is tough to take your eyes off her, although you will want to at times.

Opening Night is my favorite Cassavetes, and I feel it is my duty to debunk the notion that those or any of his films aside from Shadows was strictly improvised. In fact, his films were tightly scripted after actor improvisation was used to contribute to his ideas. The coherence of a film like Opening Night, the development of the themes of aging, vanity, and hope, could not just spring from the improvisational head of even the very fine actors in the movie. If you pay attention to the dialogue (outside of the lines in the play), it is obvious that much care was taken to craft them (e.g., the scene where Myrtle explains to the playwright what problems she is having with the character and script).