opening night (w&d cassavetes)

Cassavetes’ baroque movie, once again placing his wife centre stage and riffing off their marriage, is one of the great theatre films. Once upon a time the worlds of theatre and film essentially overlapped, nourishing each other in a mutually beneficial feedback loop. Perhaps it can be said that this is still the case on Broadway and the West End, but, having worked in both mediums, the relationship feels more tenuous than it was back in the day. Cassavetes’ film describes the build up to an opening night in New York of a new play, staring Myrtle (Gena Rowlands) as the vampish lead who is well into middle age and scared of being defined as old. The part she has been contracted to perform is that of an ageing woman and she fights back against the writing and the role, as she goes through her own mid-life crisis. Ben Gazzara is the director trying to hold everything together. The film meanders and deviates and could be described as self-indulgent, were it not for the fact that this very self-indulgence is integral to the movie’s dynamic. In an early scene, Gazzara spends an age on the phone to Myrtle assuring her she is brilliant, in spite of the fact it is four int he morning and his wife wants to go to bed with him. Everyone loves Myrtle but they all know she’s a disaster area. The film is a remarkable study in stardom and its excesses, as well as what makes for the type of person who can become larger than life, both on stage and off it. In the closing sequence, Rowlands and Cassavetes are playing a couple on stage, within the play, but it is clear that they are riffing and improvising and basically making the whole thing up. The director, producer and writer can hardly bear to watch. But when the curtain goes down they are cheered to the skies. Cassavetes’ vision feels both deeply cynical and deeply honest: when you get to be *the star* anything you can do is untouchable and revered, even though Rowlands is blind drunk and making it up as she goes along. The scene goes on too long, it becomes self-indulgent, and anyone who has ever been inside a play and seen the actors start to take it over, will see this for the painful exercise it is, but that’s the whole point. The figure they applaud and deify is in all likelihood a liability, and a danger to themselves. The toxic industry of stardom is a bride stripped bare in Cassavetes’ tortured masterpiece.