Opening Night
A movie about a train wreck in the end becomes something of a train wreck itself. The plot concerns actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) as she (sometimes literally) tackles the lead role in the play ‘The Second Woman’ written by Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell) and directed by Manny Victor (Ben Gazarra).
In the opening sequence Cassavets gives us a close-up of Myrtle sucking pretty hard on a bottle moments before going on the New Haven stage, and it’s soon pretty obvious that she has just as difficult a time coming off it as well. Compounding this fine mess is the death of an autograph hound mere seconds after their brief exchange outside the theatre. She goes mental, partly because of her preoccupation with the death of the young woman and partly because of her own dissatisfaction with the material and the role it is her job to perform, chiefly about a woman confronting, or not confronting, the fact that she’s getting older. Things get worse before they never really get better. Sarah and Manny aren’t much help and neither is the spiritualist supplied by the former or the booze and affection available from the latter. By the time the play is set to open in New York Myrtle stops showing up altogether, and in the final scenes (actually filmed before an unwitting and yet very forgiving live audience in Pasadena) there’s enough improvisation out of character to embarrass the greenest of junior high school thespians.
Yes, Cassavetes is certainly a model and a hero for his tireless and daring work as an independent filmmaker. Those shifts from stage to backstage and back to stage are very nicely done. The acting here is mostly good, even by the Teamster pulled from the set, John Tuell. Gazarra and Rowlands are always worth watching, and listening to them rasp and slur their way around each other here is usually pretty fun. But when we go from watching Maurice smack Myrtle around the stage to bouncing up and down like a Gorilla and proclaiming himself ‘Superman,’ it seems less about courage and more about nobody really having a clue as to which takes will be used and which won’t and what the hell difference will it make anyway. There are some fine moments here, I just don't think they add up to a very good film.
In the opening sequence Cassavets gives us a close-up of Myrtle sucking pretty hard on a bottle moments before going on the New Haven stage, and it’s soon pretty obvious that she has just as difficult a time coming off it as well. Compounding this fine mess is the death of an autograph hound mere seconds after their brief exchange outside the theatre. She goes mental, partly because of her preoccupation with the death of the young woman and partly because of her own dissatisfaction with the material and the role it is her job to perform, chiefly about a woman confronting, or not confronting, the fact that she’s getting older. Things get worse before they never really get better. Sarah and Manny aren’t much help and neither is the spiritualist supplied by the former or the booze and affection available from the latter. By the time the play is set to open in New York Myrtle stops showing up altogether, and in the final scenes (actually filmed before an unwitting and yet very forgiving live audience in Pasadena) there’s enough improvisation out of character to embarrass the greenest of junior high school thespians.
Yes, Cassavetes is certainly a model and a hero for his tireless and daring work as an independent filmmaker. Those shifts from stage to backstage and back to stage are very nicely done. The acting here is mostly good, even by the Teamster pulled from the set, John Tuell. Gazarra and Rowlands are always worth watching, and listening to them rasp and slur their way around each other here is usually pretty fun. But when we go from watching Maurice smack Myrtle around the stage to bouncing up and down like a Gorilla and proclaiming himself ‘Superman,’ it seems less about courage and more about nobody really having a clue as to which takes will be used and which won’t and what the hell difference will it make anyway. There are some fine moments here, I just don't think they add up to a very good film.
posted by Quin Finnegan at 10:37 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home