#41 — Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977)
I’m not sure how good John Cassavetes was at birthdays or anniversaries, but he sure gave his wife a helluva gift every time he pushed a script across the breakfast table. Gena Rowlands got married to Cassavetes in 1954, four years before making her film debut and almost a full decade before 1963’s A Child is Waiting, the first of ten times that she was directed in a cinematic effort by her husband. Maybe unsurprisingly, they brought out the best in one another. Cassavetes knew how to push, coax and nurture Rowlands to towering, ferocious performances, and having Rowlands in the picture often helped Cassavetes find a focus in his storytelling that could otherwise be lacking. It may be faulty to apply particularly pronounced gender dynamics to their work together, but Rowland’s active presence in a Cassavetes film did seem to buff down his kneejerk machismo, a bullish, brutish manner of meandering from point to point. He didn’t exactly opt for his best behavior, but he did acquiesce to some more refined intellectual manners.

They’d already worked together many times when they made Opening Night, including the superlative effort A Woman Under the Influence a couple years earlier, a film which earned Rowlands her first of two Oscar nominations. (I’ll note that we will be getting to that one before this tally is complete.) In Opening Night, Rowlands plays Myrtle Gordon, a revered theatrical actress who is edging uncomfortably close to the downslope of her career, the natural and unwelcome progress of time bringing her to the point where a callous business begins to lose interest. Myrtle’s new role is already a nightly reminder of the way her ingenue youth has disappeared, and she receives a more symbolic example of that disappearance when she is a direct witness to the death of an impetuous, girlish fan in an accident. A stretch that was already problematic becomes a rolling scene of emotional turmoil as Myrtle descends into something that skirts close to self-destructive mania.

As was his tendency, Cassavetes develops the material with a commitment to naturalism that strikes against the well-worn norms of narrative cinema like a thug splintering a door with his heaving shoulder. Scenes play out as long single takes, sometimes with the camera positioned on the deep fringe of the action like an interloper witness or, befitting the creative ecosystem in which the story is set, an audience member who has seats that are best described as merely adequate. Unlike some others who’ve adopted his techniques over the years, Cassavetes doesn’t make these choices without purpose. Maybe more accurately, his purposes extended beyond churlishly breaking rules. Cassavetes is working out deeper truths, adding almost frightening levels of intensity to the emotional turmoil by making the audience practically live side-by-side with the characters on screen. He shows them simply living–fighting, working, scraping for a little tenderness–which instills a vivid reality to the harshest scenes that makes them appropriately difficult to watch.

Rowlands is flat-out sensational in Opening Night. She plays a woman accustomed to taking on roles, both as an actress and as a professional who’s so accustomed to every bit of her being scrutinized for flaws that she’s developed an opaque veneer. Rowlands toys with those many layers like an expert card sharp manipulating a deck, unearthing new aspects of the character in a manner that always challenges the viewer to consider what’s truth, what’s facade and whether or not there’s ultimately all that much difference between the two.