Watching a live performance is no different from watching any event where you know there's the potential for disaster. A taped or filmed event never has the same nerve-wracking intensity as it's obviously crafted in such a way the creators know what the audience is going to see before it happens. But a live show... now that's intense.

Live actors on stage can screw up. They can mess up their lines, miss cues, bump into things, trip over themselves and knock themselves unconcious (as I believe someone did on a Charlottetown stage a few years back, although, alas, I didn't see it). Someone with a sick mind may possibly wish for something even more drastic, such as one of the actors making a fool of himself, or going crazy, in front of many confused people.

Gena Rowlands' character in John Cassavetes' Opening Night will satisfy those sick freaks out there. She is a popular theatre actress, who, inexplicably, as far as the people around her are concerned, begins to go insane just as her lastest show is starting its national tour.

It's not about screwing up lines and cues. It's veering off the script in embarassing ways. It's getting slapped to the ground on stage and acting as if it's real, and that she's really injured. It's coming to the performance drunk. It's breaking free from the script and into her own tangents, forcing the other cast members to do one hell of an improvisation. Overall, it's all about making the audience, cast, the producers, and perhaps even those of you sitting at home watching this movie uncomfortable.

The gruesome event which triggers her sudden descent into insanity is during the first scene of the film, after a performance in which a young, distraught, star-struck fan tries to get her autograph after the show. The young girl looks fragile, lost and needy as she follows her to the limo, and stands out in the pouring rain, her hands against the outside of the limo window. Rowlands is mystified, curious about this girl.

Almost immediately after the limo pulls away, the young girl is struck by another car and dies instantly.

The experience with the fan embeds itself within Rowlands' pysche, and completly lays waste to her sanity and her sense of self. There's points in this movie where she sees the image of the young girl, and even does battle with it, including a pretty scary bit while talking to a supposed "spiritualist", a friend of the playwright.

Her insanity is rooted in some geniune concerns, especially for a woman in her business. Her major beef is the fact she is playing an aging woman. She knows if she plays the character realistically -- as a woman who acts like one who is walking into that age group -- she will be forever typecast in older roles. Her actions, obviously worrisome, are nevertheless those of someone who wants desperately to deny her aging, to go kicking and screaming and protesting about entering that higher age group. But it isn't just the fact she'll be typecast which upsets her. It's the fact she's devoted her whole life to her work. She has no husband, no lover, no family, no children, nothing -- just her work. She doesn't want to believe she's too old to ever get any of these things she hasn't been able to get in her youth. She doesn't want to believe the elderly playwright whose play seems borne out of her own conviction her life was over after she turned 40. She painfully wants to believe she's still loved, desirable -- she alternately flirts and whines to both the director (Ben Gazzara) and one of her co-stars (Cassavetes).

All throughout this movie I couldn't help but think nobody else really cared for her well-being. Here's a woman who is crazy, an alcoholic, and who wrecks havoc with the production, but instead of getting a new star and protecting the old one, everyone around her practically wants the show to continue at any cost, embarrassment or not! You'd think after a night in which an actress, after being slapped (as part of the script) and lying on the floor for five minutes, before finally getting up to make some crazy speech to your co-star (in front of the paying audience) about how you're such a great actor and that I know, and the audience knows, this is just a play, the producer would do the right thing and pull her from the show -- but, no, they send her to some spiritualist, and then afterwards expect her to continue on with the show, even as she grows even more disturbed.

The last sequence, in which she shows up an hour late and drunk, would probably never happen in real life, but it's quite the spectacle. The best comparison would probably be if you were to see a car wreck and were forced at gunpoint to continue watching the horror. This probably goes for most of the scenes in the film. Cassavetes seems to have had this knack for letting scenes play out "too long" -- a "normal" movie would probably just show a short scene of embarassment, but here, in a few cases, we're offered five to ten minutes of quiet discomfort. Actually, my car wreck comparison is too graphic -- it's probably closer to being at a party with a drunken loudmouth who won't shut up or leave. At first it's funny, then it's just painful. But Cassavetes is doing it the way it has to be done. It's true a different editor could cut this film down by a few minutes and still retain the basic point. But at the same time, Cassavetes' stories are about crazy and wounded people who act out and do embarassing things. Might as well amplify it with some scenes which go past the breaking point.

John Cassavetes was an interesting guy. He acted in a lot of films, co-starring as Mia Farrow's husband in Rosemary's Baby, getting an Oscar nomination for The Dirty Dozen, and doing many other films besides, before he died in the mid-1980s. Yet he's also famous for being a groundbreaking independant filmmaker. While "independant" film today mostly consists of small films funded by small divisions of major studios, most of Cassavetes' work is completely do-it-yourself. (although I'd like to see his 1960's flirtation with big-studio work -- Too Late Blues with Bobby Darin, and A Child is Waiting with Judy Garland and Burt Lancaster)

Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, Minnie and Moskowitz, and this film are basically cheap films written, directed, edited, etc, by Cassavetes and starring friends -- Cassavetes himself often appeared in them, and Gena Rowlands, who was his wife, starred in nearly all of them. People like Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel and others also often showed up.

He made cheap films, but they're often quite good. These are films with a vision; there's little that's commercial about them. You just have to take it or leave it. He managed to make these films under his own strength and with little outside support. He's an inspiration to us all. Of course it helps to have been a working character actor at the time so he could pay for the films, but, still, Cassavetes is proof that sometimes it's good to play outside the rules.

Gena Rowlands really knows how to play this type of character. She seems messed up and scrappy and strong and fragile all at the same time. She's the one who makes most of Cassavetes' films memorable. And the script is quite strong -- even as it feels almost improvised, it never truly steers off-course. It's true a film like this can make me antsy with its long scenes and uncomfortable behaviour, but Opening Night is still a very good film from a very interesting filmmaker.

Note: I must point out the DVD I watched is a really old (1998!) Pioneer edition (movie only, on two sides!) and not the new Criterion one. I had written this title down on my video store's little customer request notebook, and am quite happy they fufilled my request, even if it ended up being one of the first DVD's ever made!

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV