GENA ROWLANDS: Review

Because of the way Netflix is set up, I tend to order films in groups based on specific actors. So it’s not entirely incidental that I watched two Gena Rowlands films in the last two days. One was “Woman Under the Influence” directed by her husband, John Cassavetes, and the other was “Another Woman” directed by Woody Allen. They could not be more different, the characters could not be more different, the wardrobes, the premises, the goals, the whole style could not be more different. This is very useful indeed. These are Actor’s Studio films -- not just type-casting and rambling.

“Woman Under the Influence” is in a blue-collar world of men served by women and Gena’s character is not entirely suited for her role as wife and mother. These big ethnic physical guys in fact have strong sensibilities and a good deal of compassion. I LOVE the scene where the husband, Peter Falk, stupidly brings his whole crew home for breakfast and they sit at the table (extended by adding a card table) singing opera -- gorgeously. It’s not the Italian who does it, but a black man. Gena loves it so much that she comes to him and peers into his mouth to watch that glorious sound come out. The men are a little disconcerted, but not so much as when she begins to investigate and admire all the men. Then the Falk character loses his cool and bellows at her, jealous and embarrassed.

Cassavetes, who wrote his script and claims the actors stuck to it, says his conception is that the woman is not crazy -- though she is removed to a mental hospital for six months -- but simply unique, close to the surface, unprotected except by family. Her husband loves her child-like responsiveness, but still expects her to be “normal,” partly goaded by his mother. Gena wears mini-skirts innocently, her long legs and pink anklets suggesting a little short-skirted girl.

In “Another Woman” Woody Allen is on another track entirely, a kind of interpretation of Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” from a woman’s point of view, an investigation of how people get cold and hard in service to social expectations and then are punished for it. How they lose themselves but still have the possibility of recovery. Now Gena wears those “expensive putty-colored clothes” that I talk about. Mismatched but subtly coordinated and tailored expensive shirts and jackets.

This movie is anchored in a reality that is pretty unreal to me: the world of the privileged that revolves through cocktail parties and elite restaurants, in a dance of supposed friendship that enables adultery and professional achievement at the same time. I’ve seen it from the outside, esp. in big-church ministers. People don’t trust their guts because they can’t feel them anymore unless they are ill. Allen, of course, believes in psychotherapy as explanation and so this woman, instead of being on the couch herself, overhears the therapy of another woman, not unlike her young self and unafraid to feel her unhappiness. (It’s Mia Farrow, very pregnant, maybe really. And very weepy, maybe really.)

The rest is stylized: high paternal expectations, a brother sacrificed in her interest, a mother who doesn’t seem to exist, friends who alternate between jealousy and admiration, all acted out in the labyrinth of Manhattan. Rowlands is as brilliantly controlled and rational in the face of irrationality as she was, in the earlier film, entirely physical and inventive. These two movies would be excellent to compare and contrast in a formal film class or just as a private investigation.

It’s been a while since the great freeing of women that had us (I’m female, of course) taking men’s jobs and investigating female anatomy in the frank and frontal ways of Judy Chicago and her labial dinner plates. Where did it go? Is it because there was no where TO go? Or was it just a sensational moment where people had speculum parties and gaped at their own mother’s cervixes? Is society any different than it used to be, or have the gender roles merely been moved around a bit, so that now women take the roles of oppressive school principals and stone-faced highway patrolmen? And men fade off into neurotic self-absorption, living off of others.

What we seem to miss is that relationships exist only in the context of a much larger cultural order. If you take part of one culture (say the 19th century American Indian traditions of the individual child existing in the extended familial web of aunts and uncles, all considered to have the obligations of parents) and insert it in another (say, modern suburbia or condos where people don’t know each other and their shared environment is a function of their incomes, sometimes precarious, so that their safety depends upon not extending their obligations to “other” people) it just won’t work. (Tell Hilary.) And the abandoning of other people’s children is justified by accusations of sexual perversion.

Another movie, without Gena Rowlands, I watched in the last few days was “Gone, Baby, Gone” by what I’ll call the Affleck brothers, one acting and one directing. The plot is a kidnapped child -- actually two, one who survives and one who does not -- in the Boston neighborhood where the boys grew up. The premise is that being locally rooted gives privileged knowledge and therefore privileged power, even though the Affleck character is only a private investigator. (The policeman in charge is that moral hero, Morgan Freeman, who is black. The saved child is white, so Freeman has a white wife. At some level in this society we are always playing checkers.) Insisting on knowing means running headlong into moral dilemmas that cannot be solved. What to do about childish women who have babies they are not capable of protecting? What to do when what “feels” right goes against the rules of blood relationship? When the goal of the law can only be achieved by corruption and lying? This movie is not at the level of either Gena Rowlands movie, partly because it is held hostage by the larger culture that demands gunfights and gruesomeness. But it’s serious.

The core religious question, some say, is “what should I do to be saved?” Might be in terms of going to heaven or might be in terms of just getting through this life right here, like this economic maelstrom we just fell into. This is Woody Allen’s perennial question and probably Bergman’s, too, though Bergman begins to approach something larger and so does Cassavetes. They are willing to look at the question of “what should I do to save others?” Particularly those who are well-loved, like our children. Everyone was someone’s child once.

One parental and cultural set of givens produces the wonderfully but weirdly whacko “woman under the influence” and the other makes a “different woman” who uses her head so cleverly that her heart is left behind. Must we choose? Is there a reconciliation?