Great Movie. Great Performances.

For the record, "A Woman Under The Influence" was NOT improvised--Cassavettes' first film, "Shadows", was improvised, but heavily rehearsed. The films he directed afterwards were scripted. I've seen a page from the original script of Faces, and in comparing it to the finished film, its clear that the actors veered very little from the scripted dialogue. This is also very apparent when you compare the published Script for Minnie and Moskowitz to the finished film.

"Mikey and Nicky", Elaine May's film starring Cassavettes and Falk, had a script that was constantly being revised by May in colaboration with the leads throughout the shoot, and contained much ad-libbing, but this was not a technique that Cassavettes employed in his own films.

Cassavettes was a brilliant writer, and it's a testament to his ability that his films appeared ad-libbed, an accomplishment often taken for granted or ignored by many of his critics. Cassavette's dialogue is analogous to everyday speech, and he frequently and deliberately subverted the narrative institutions that we've come to expect in traditional drama. There are no story arcs or pat resolutions in Cassavettes films. So much of what has been misread as undisiplined or accidental in his films is in fact, very deliberate. The only truly accidental or technically undisiplined aspect of his films tends to be the cinematography--and this is mainly in his early films. Cassavettes was much better with actors than he was with a camera. But despite how washed-out and poorly lit many of the scenes in "Faces" tend to be, Cassavettes knew how to tell a story, and his main concern was in capturing the performances of the actors--some of the greatest performances ever captured on film.

Mike Leigh, initially inspired by Cassavettes, often attempts to achieve a similar kind of naturalism, but Leigh's recent films tend to be bound by a more traditional story structure. Leigh's earlier movies seemed to be attempts to subvert this tendency, but they leaned too heavily on the actors performances instead of the quality of the writing, and overall, tended not to be as realized as his later films, like "Naked", with the possible exception of his first, "Bleak Moments". Then there's broad comedies like "Nuts in May"; the only film in Cassavettes ouvre that seems remotely similar is "Love Streams" (and possibly "Minnie and Moskowitz"), a film that's worth watching but very rarely screened, and probably one of his weaker efforts. Not to completely dismiss it--it has quite a few only-in-a-Cassavettes-film moments, and it's good to see Cassavettes and his wife Gena Rowlands on the screen together for one last time. But Cassavettes isn't very good at broad humor, as is particularly evidenced by movies like "Big Trouble". Leigh is much better suited to humor through caricature, while Cassavettes tends to generate humor through incident. Cassavettes was too ernest in his aims to truly satirize.


Other directors who work in a similar vein include Elaine May with "Mikey and Nicky"; Many of the films of Ken Loach (though Ken Loach can sometimes be relentless with his social injustice agenda, an agenda that can supercede everything else that should be good about his movies); Sleisenger's "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" and "Midnight Cowboy"; Harmony Korine and Larry Clark's "Kids";Johnathan Nossiter's "Sunday"; about two-thirds of "Last Tango in Paris" made brilliant by Brando despite its melodramatic and unlikely premise,and a number of Brandoless scenes that seem as if they were inserted from another movie; Susan Skoog's much overlooked "Whatever", and Bob Rafelson's "Five Easy Pieces". Some of these movies were blessed by good fortune and happinstance, produced under conditions that can never be repeated, like "Kids", or "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" (Why didn't Penelope Gilliatt write any more movies?), and the infamously difficult "Mikey and Nicky".

I will also begrudgingly mention Henry Jaglom, though he tends to be the least interesting actor in his own movies in which he plays a character not named Henry Jaglom who acts suspiciously like Henry Jaglom, like Woody Allen when Woody Allen isn't funny. But sometimes he can get honesty out of his performers despite himself. I am very anxious to see "Tracks" in particular, in hopes that it will be the exception to my usual reservations about Jaglom, but I've been unable to find it either on video or DVD.

If anyone knows of other directors or films that they think might be similar in spirit to these, please let me know.

On a loosely related note: One of the most disheartenning onscreen moments I've experienced in recent memory was when through some accident of chance I found myself watching a miserably bad Hollywood thriller called "Taking Lives" with Ethan Hawke and Angelina Jolie. In it, Gena Rowlands plays Hawke's mother, and Hawke, the killer, decapitates her with his bare hands in an ellevator. Its a very gory scene and we see her head actually roll off her shoulders. It would've been comical if it wasn't so tragic. This seems like such an indignity for such a very fine actress to be subjected to when she deserves the same respect and regard as her male acting counterparts, like Brando or John Hurt, or Ian Mckellan, or John Voigt. It seems like actors like Rowlands and Glenda Jackson and Karen Black and Siân Phillips, who should be much more highly regarded, are forced to either retire from acting alltogether, or to take roles that are usually relegated to character actors of limited range, like Thelma Ritter. Nothing against Thelma Ritter. But she's no Gena Rowlands.


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