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    Gena Rowlands Shows Her True Power in ‘A Woman Under the Influence’

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    In “A Woman Under the Influence,” her gloriously, terrifyingly imperfect Mabel was emblematic of the actress’s work, especially with John Cassavetes.Midway through “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974) — one of a number of astonishing films starring Gena Rowlands, who died Wednesday, and directed by her husband John Cassavetes — the distance between you and what’s onscreen abruptly vanishes. It’s the kind of moment that true movie believers know and yearn for, that transporting instance when your world seems to melt away and you’re one with the film. It can be revelatory; at times, as with Rowlands’s performance here, it can also be excruciatingly, viscerally painful.Rowlands is playing Mabel, an exuberantly alive woman of great sensitivities whose husband, Nicky (Peter Falk), loves her deeply but doesn’t understand her. They’re home and he has just yelled at her in front of some colleagues, who’ve fled. Now, as this husband and wife look at each other across their dining-room table, they struggle to push past the rancor and hurt. But Mabel is struggling harder because her purchase on everyday life has begun to badly slip, bewildering them both. Her love for Nicky and their children feels boundless, and it radiates off her like a fever, but Mabel is headed for a breakdown.Working with Cassavetes, Rowlands was helping find a new way to make American cinema.Faces InternationalAs the two begin working it out, Cassavetes cuts between them, framing each in isolating close-up. At first, Nicky looks at her with a faint, inscrutable smile that Mabel doesn’t return. Instead, she stares at him and holds up a thumb, as if she were getting ready to hitch a ride out, then she begins a strange pantomime. She screws her face into a scowl, waves her arms, mimes some words. Rowland had an incredibly expressive, near-elastic face and equally extraordinary control of it, and the quicksilver shifts she uses here are unexpected and destabilizing; you want to keep watching Mabel but aren’t sure you can.Within seconds, Nicky and Mabel are talking again and revisiting or, really, relitigating what just happened. “Wacko!” he yells. “I like your friends,” she answers, her voice rising. As Mabel keeps talking, Rowlands widens her eyes but she also shifts the character’s focus inward. Suddenly, Mabel isn’t looking at Nicky and she isn’t exactly talking to him, either. Instead, as Mabel animatedly continues, her gestures and expressions growing more exaggerated, she no longer seems present. She’s somewhere else and then just as abruptly she returns to the here and now, and everything shifts again. Mabel looks at Nicky, her face open and soft. “Tell me what you want me to — how you want me to be,” she says. “I can be that. I can be anything.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gena Rowlands, Actress Who Brought Raw Drama to Her Roles, Dies at 94

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      Gena Rowlands, the intense, elegant dramatic actress who, often in collaboration with her husband, John Cassavetes, starred in a series of introspective independent films, has died. She was 94.The death was confirmed by the office of Daniel Greenberg, a representative for Ms. Rowlands’s son, the director Nick Cassavetes. No other details were given.In June, her family said that she had been living with Alzheimer’s disease for five years.Ms. Rowlands, who often played intoxicated, deranged or otherwise on-the-verge characters, was nominated twice for best actress Oscars in performances directed by Mr. Cassavetes. The first was the title role in “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), in which her desperate, insecure character is institutionalized by her blue-collar husband (Peter Falk) because he doesn’t know what else to do. The critic Roger Ebert wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times that Ms. Rowlands was “so touchingly vulnerable to every kind of influence around her that we don’t want to tap her because she might fall apart.”Her second nomination was for “Gloria” (1980), in which she starred as a gangster’s moll on the run with an orphaned boy.Ms. Rowlands and John Marley in “Faces,” which Renata Adler of The New York Times called “a really important movie” about “the way things are.” Like many of her movies, it was directed by Ms. Rowland’s husband, John Cassavetes.United Archives, via Getty ImagesBut it was “Faces” (1968), in which she starred as a young prostitute opposite John Marley, that first brought the Cassavetes-Rowlands partnership to moviegoers’ attention. Critics spread the word; Renata Adler described the film in The New York Times as “a really important movie” about “the way things are,” and Mr. Ebert called it “astonishing.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Opening Night’ Review: Ivo van Hove Makes a Stylish Movie Into a Sludgy Travesty

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      Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of the 1977 John Cassavetes film, with music by Rufus Wainwright, turns a taut character study into a corny melodrama.In a London auditorium, a work of art is being desecrated. “Opening Night,” John Cassavetes’s understatedly stylish 1977 movie about an actress struggling with midlife ennui, has been reimagined as a musical by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove, and the result is a travesty.Its antiheroine, the Broadway superstar Myrtle Gordon (Sheridan Smith), has landed the lead role in a play about a middle-aged woman. But she isn’t feeling it: Though she is about 40, she insists she can’t relate. She stumbles through rehearsals, clashing with the director, Manny (Hadley Fraser), and the playwright, Sarah (Nicola Hughes), then goes rogue during previews, taking liberties with the script.To compound matters, the actress develops a neurotic fixation on Nancy (Shira Haas), a 17-year-old fan killed in a car crash moments after getting Myrtle’s autograph. Convinced that Nancy is a cipher for her own lost youth, Myrtle intermittently hallucinates the dead girl’s ghost, and even converses with it. Myrtle is unraveling, but the show — somehow — must go on.Smith with Shira Haas, who plays Nancy, a fan of Myrtle’s who was killed in a car crash after getting Myrtle’s autograph.Jan VersweyveldIt’s a compelling story line, filled with dramatic possibilities, but “Opening Night,” which runs at the Gielgud Theater through July 27, is scuppered by a series of poor choices. Smith is miscast as Myrtle, for a start: Her onstage bearing exudes a homely approachability rather than high-strung poise or inscrutable aloofness.Benjamin Walker is wooden as Maurice, Myrtle’s stage co-star and ex-partner, who Cassavetes himself played charmingly in the film. The estranged couple’s brittle onstage chemistry is an essential ingredient in the drama; here, they seem like actual strangers. Haas’s spectral Nancy is a disconcertingly cutesy symbol of youthful feminine vitality, a sprite-like figure who scurries around the stage in a short skirt, knee-high socks and platform boots — suggesting not so much a young woman as a pubescent child.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Watching This Movie Taught Me It Was OK to Fail

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      Gena Rowlands’s destabilizing brilliance in “Opening Night” turned out to be the reassurance I needed.One evening in May 2017, I saw the director John Cassavetes’s 1977 film, “Opening Night,” starring his wife and collaborator, Gena Rowlands, in the lead role. Rowlands plays Myrtle Gordon, a successful stage actor whose life is upended when she witnesses a young fan’s death in a traffic accident. It’s an intense film, with long stretches of mortification punctuated with grim humor, concluding in a scene of agonizing victory: So drunk she can barely stand, Myrtle arrives hours late to the first night of her new play, delivering a chaotic and heroic performance which unravels and reshapes the production. It’s a triumphantly unhappy happy ending, which I watched with a mixture of horror and glee.I was in grad school at Berkeley at the time, studying literature, subletting a room in a too-expensive apartment around the corner from Chez Panisse. I was not enjoying myself. Most days I’d walk down Shattuck Avenue to the library, where I’d borrow as many books as I could carry, then head back to my room and leave the books in tottering piles, unread. I spent many evenings drinking alone, occasionally half-watching a movie on my laptop. I dreamed of dropping out, but was terrified of failure. When this routine eventually became too desolate, I occupied myself in the evenings by watching whatever was on at the Pacific Film Archive, where I caught “Opening Night.”The genius of Rowlands’s performance style is in the way she melds the unapproachable beauty — sophistication, elegance, poise — of Hollywood’s Golden Age with a gift for physical humor. There are moments in her performances that approach slapstick: In one scene in “Love Streams,” from 1984, she tries to persuade a French baggage handler to help her with a preposterous pile of luggage; it could be something out of Jacques Tati. Elsewhere, she reproduces erratic gestures reminiscent of vaudeville, wildly jerking her thumb in the air and blowing raspberries at a passer-by in Cassavetes’s 1974 film, “A Woman Under the Influence.”What Rowlands offered me was an uncompromising acknowledgment of the fear and doubt at the heart of life — the confusion, the distress, the trepidation.But these moments aren’t quite played for laughs; they’re as painful as they are funny. Her gestures border on tics: expressive of something painful, buried, hard to confront. There are these looks she gives people, an irresistible combination of refinement and corniness, simultaneously ingratiating and imposing. There’s this way she has of telling people to “listen,” half-imperative, half-plea; a way that the skin around her eyes crinkles in a petition to be understood. She is adept at using physicality to undercut her humor with desperation, her characters buoyed by a willingness to withstand humiliation.Watching Rowlands’s performance in “Opening Night” showed me the necessity of embracing failure. That film is an exploration of the intense, sometimes mortifying personal commitment needed to create art. It dislodged something inside me and sharpened the smudged textures of my days. Rowlands’s character is thrown into personal and professional crisis by the prospect of becoming stuck — typecast in a particular kind of role — and of her life’s becoming constricted as a result. Watching her writhe against this tightening, I recognized myself: I realized that my graduate studies were primarily a way of rerouting my blocked desire to write. Again, I was afraid: incapable of writing because I was unwilling to risk rejection.A little over a month after that screening of “Opening Night,” my father died suddenly. I came back to England and, half-glad for the excuse, abandoned my Ph.D. But I didn’t know what to do instead, and hunkered down into my despair. Feeling the weight of the failure that I’d feared, I slid into a morass. In my grief I had to figure out how exactly I was going to live, and I felt wretched about my prospects. To distract myself, I began a project of writing about every movie I watched. Slowly, the words started to come, but I still struggled with a reluctance to look too closely at the difficult feelings that my grief had left me with.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More