“Gena Forever”

In July of 2023, I interviewed Aubrey Plaza for Emily the Criminal. What does this have to do with Gena Rowlands? I’m going to ask you to stick with me for a moment. While chatting about the film, we ventured off and spoke briefly about another film that she starred in, Black Bear. 

Black Bear is a strange and wondrous creation. The film starts out like a really good M. Night Shyamalan film, but down the stretch turns into a film within a film in which Plaza plays the lead actress having a nervous breakdown during filming. I told Plaza that her performance in the latter portion of Black Bear reminded me of the films John Cassavetes made with Gena Rowlands, particularly Opening Night. 

Rowlands and Cassavetes were more than husband and wife, they were the godmother and godfather of independent film, with Rowlands in front of the camera and Cassavetes on both sides as director and frequent co-star. Together the couple made seven films together with not a clinker in the bunch. Faces, their first film together in 1968 was a groundbreaking experimental film that heralded the arrival of a DIY filmmaker and actress who would stretch the limits of improvisation and on screen tension. Along with Cassavetes first film Shadows from nearly a decade earlier, Faces was seen as one of the first prestigious films of the auteur era. In Rowlands, Cassavetes had found his perfect muse.

Rowlands was once called ““The most important and original movie actor of the past half century-plus.” by The New Yorker’s Richard Brody in 2021. High praise to say the least, but when one consumes the work of Rowlands (and her work is consuming) during her 16-year peak from 1968-1984, well, let’s just say that even if you don’t agree, there really isn’t much of a reason to put up an argument against Brody’s quote. At minimum, she was close enough. 

Rowlands and Cassavetes followed up Faces with the comedic drama Minnie and Moskovitz, a film about a seemingly mismatched couple played by Rowlands and Seymour Cassel. The film wasn’t as well received as Faces, but it has more than its fair share of awkward delights. 1974 would bring what most critics would probably consider Rowlands and Cassavetes greatest film together, A Woman Under the Influence. 

As Mabel, an often drunk and distraught mother of three who becomes increasingly unmoored as the film continues to its devastating (if somewhat hopeful) finale. The fearlessness of Rowlands’ performance is absolutely breathtaking. There was no vanity in her playing of Mabel. Rowlands went to deep, dark, and even ugly places that most actors of even the brightest stripe would shy away from. For her role as Mabel, Rowlands received her first Oscar nomination as Best Actress (the Academy also gave Cassavetes a nod for his direction). 

In 1980, Rowlands would receive her second and final Oscar nomination (the Academy would make up for this oversight in 2015 by awarding her with an honorary Oscar for her body of work) for Gloria as a gangster’s moll trying to protect a foul-mouthed child. While Gloria is the most accessible and commercial film Rowlands and Cassavetes made together, the movie struggled to make a profit despite a low budget and strong reviews. 

In their final film together, Love Streams, a far too overlooked film about a brother and sister (Cassavetes and Rowlands) who spend a few intense days together. Love Streams is more focused on the troubled Cassavetes character, but Rowlands buttresses the film perfectly, resulting in a forgotten classic worthy of (re)discovery. 

But it’s the duo’s 1977 film Opening Night that I return to the most. Playing a Broadway actress on the verge (and then over the edge) of a nervous breakdown just before her new play’s debut. Opening Night may not quite reach the level of shaggy perfection that A Woman Under the Influence does as a portrait of a person in a state of great strife, but it’s the first Rowlands/Cassavetes film I ever saw, and the raw, wrenching emotions that Rowlands plumbed from some place that few actors have access to has always stuck with me. “Here is something I have not seen,” I remember thinking. I was far too young when I saw the film to fully appreciate its complexity, but it was so simultaneously thrilling and hard to watch due to Rowlands relentlessly anguished performance, that to watch Opening Night was like discovering a new language. It was to understand that the only limits to art are that of one’s imagination and courage., Rowlands and Cassavetes were not lacking for either. 

Sadly, Cassavetes, a long-time alcoholic succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver in 1989, leaving us to wonder what wonders he and Rowlands might have come up with had they more time together. 

After the death of Cassavetes, Rowlands’ career became more conventional, which is no surprise considering when John Cassavetes came into the world, no one else quite like him would follow. Of course, the same could be said of Rowlands who classed up many a film whether it was up to her skill level or not. I would wage that most casual filmgoers will remember her best for her turn in the weepie The Notebook (directed by her son, Nick Cassavetes), but the movie that I felt she gave a real jolt to was the light(ish) and modest romantic Julia Roberts dramedy Something to Talk About. As a film, it’s mostly a pretty charming time-killer, but the scene where Rowlands dresses down her husband (played by Robert Duvall) and closes her beration with “And you fart in your sleep!” leaves me in stitches to this day just to think about it. 

Of course, Rowlands true legacy is that of her films with Cassavetes, a catalog of cinematic possibilities that will outlast those of us who survive until the earth is struck by an asteroid or is covered fully in water. 

Thinking back on my interview with Aubrey Plaza, I took a quick look at her Instagram page last night. She had one new post. A still shot of Rowlands in Gloria holding a cigarette and looking impossibly formidable. Under the post, Plaza wrote simply, “Gena Forever.”

Forever indeed.

Gena Rowlands died on August 14, 2024. She was 94 years old.