Love Streams

One of two pieces I wrote recently about John Cassavetes' not-quite-swan song, his masterpiece Love Streams. An excerpt:

The film’s title alludes to an idea Sarah has as she reels from losing her family, a notion that “love is a stream; it’s continuous, it doesn’t stop.” If it does not stop, however, it can slow and divert like a stream, and contrary to the feverishly over-complicated efforts of Sarah to push love forward and Robert’s own attempt to dam it, it will always take the path of least resistance. At its heart, the film is a comedy: in an oeuvre filled with all-time classic drunk scenes, the sequence of Cassevetes throwing himself in the car of club singer Susan (Diahnne Abbot), driving to her place, crashing, then being unable to get out of the vehicle is a mini-masterpiece. The physicality of Cassavetes’ acting in this moment could be a precursor for Leonardo DiCaprio’s ‘luude scene in The Wolf of Wall Street: Robert turns into an assembly of arms and legs all connected to a mass of nerves without an organizing brain, and about the only thing he accomplishes as he tries to get out of the car is to cause noise, from leaving the door open until an alarm goes off to flipping on the radio and sending jazz blaring around the neighborhood.

Read the rest at Spectrum Culture.

Brian De Palma: The Fury

Though it never reaches the heights of De Palma's previous two features, The Fury combines the best aspects of both. It shares Obsession's convoluted plot and its brazen Romanticism, and it draws from Carrie's supernatural take on puberty. In a way, it resembles All the President's Men, if that movie were somehow turned into an X-Men comic.

Rarely have I seen a narrative more mangled and half-conceived, and never have I seen one that is so happy to point this out to the viewer. When the film opens on a coastal villa with the hilariously non-specific supertitle "Middle East," De Palma gives us fair warning that we'll never get the full details. In no time, the movie spirals into madness. Peter Sanza (Kirk Douglas, grayed but chiseled like a Greek god) lives a relaxed life with his young adult son, Robin (Andrew Stevens), who seems apprehensive about returning to the States after several years away. Vague mentions of some "gift" surface in their conversation, but the arrival of terrorists via dinghies interrupts the chat. In the middle of the firefight, Peter spots one of the supposed terrorists filming the shooting, and he lures attention and gunfire away by leaving Robin with his friend and associate, Childress (John Cassavetes), and grabbing a boat and heading out to sea. His plan takes a bit of a turn when the boat explodes.

This all happens in about seven minutes, mind you. It only gets crazier from here. Peter survives and discovers that Childress orchestrated the attack, sending the father into hiding so that he might reclaim his son and get revenge. Then, De Palma started piling on the craziness. Back in America, a young woman named Gillian Bellaver (Amy Irving) is trying, unsuccessfully, to deal with a talent like Robin's. She's psychic as well as telekinetic, and this causes a surprising amount of mocking and dismissal from the other girls in her school even when she proves herself.

Were any other director behind The Fury, it could not possibly have worked. It's all too silly, and the film finds itself in the nebulous area between conviction and irony, aware that it is absurd but not playing on that knowledge. The greatest running gag of the film involves the normalcy with which it treats some of its craziest elements. Everyone at school knows Gillian is psychic, but they act like she's just trying to get attention. When representatives of the "Paragon Institute" come and test the children for psychic powers, the nurse sent never once lies about why she's there, and everyone accepts this without comment.

Then, there's Douglas' character. Peter is so obstinately unkillable and singularly focused that he becomes an open parody of the individualistic hero of the cinema. He's a master of disguise, an eloquent speaker, an expert driver, a marksman, a lethal close combatant and, finally, sex on legs. Propelled by Douglas' swagger, Peter looks like he could drink James Bond under a table and then screw whatever woman Bond had been seducing previously. At one point, someone asks Peter about Childress and asks if he's afraid of the man. "He's afraid of me," comes Peter's response, and who could blame Childress for his fear?

A comic element always existed in Douglas' rogues gallery of assholes, but he is downright hysterical in the first half of the film. When Childress tracks Peter to a hotel, the man escapes in his underwear, leaping onto raised train tracks and crashing into the apartment of a slovenly couple, complete with harridan mother-in-law. Peter holds them up but is so gentlemanly that the old woman gladly helps him tie up the younger pair and even cooks the beleaguered father breakfast while he creates an old man disguise for himself.

De Palma uses the considerable talents of his leading man to springboard into some of his most audacious and boldly comic filmmaking yet. One of the best sequences in De Palma's early canon comes in the form of a ludicrous car chase between Childress' men and two off-duty cops that Peter threatens. Bob, the cop driving, laments that he only just bought his car that afternoon, but Peter guides them through stop lights, heavy fog and a construction zone, destroying every follower and not getting a scratch on the Cadillac. The sequence is littered with visual gags and ingenious direction, but De Palma reveals it all to be a setup, the punchline of which is Peter ultimately taking the car and driving it off an unfinished bridge in front of poor Bob. Why does he destroy the man's Caddy? I can't say. What else are you supposed to do with a shiny, new vehicle in a comic thriller?

Peter's efforts to find and save his son mirror and invert the murderous rage that the father in Obsession feels for the woman he does not recognize as his daughter. He sleeps with a nurse, Hester (Carrie Snodgress), at the Paragon Institute so he might get information on Robin, who stayed there after Childress abducted the boy. Peter also attempts to take Gillian, who displays a power to rival Robin's, in order to track down his son. His single-minded focus is fearsome, and Douglas' performance is surprisingly powerful even as he, more than anyone else in the cast (save perhaps Cassavetes, made to fake a dead arm the entire time), understands that the film is a lark.

His dedication to the role marks the core of the film's more touching side. Gillian hates her powers and fears the lack of control she has over them. She befriends Hester, who cannot abide by the pressure placed on the children of the Paragon Institute and helps Gillian escape. When the nurse dies in the attempt, however, both Gillian and Peter are crushed. Compared to Bond, who can so casually use women in every way possible until he finally uses them as his own bulletproof vest, Peter looks at his lover's body and understands how his quest for vengeance has gone. After spending more than an hour hunting Gillian to use her, he immediately tries to release the young woman, unwilling to risk her for his suicide mission. It's inevitable that she will still come to the final showdown in the hopes of learning to control her powers through Robin, but the sudden halt in momentum for a man to pause his righteous crusade to spare the innocent reveals a side of De Palma that he won't fully reveal at this time. He's like a flasher walking around a park in naught but an overcoat, stalking up to youths and popping open his coat to reveal a beating heart.

The ending only compounds this romantic side, with Robin, experimented upon to the point of insanity, killing his assigned lover in a mad rage when he senses Gillian coming and fears he's being replaced. He even attacks his father, who endured so much just to see his son again, only for the boy to be so far gone that Peter possibly lets the boy fall to his death, aware that his own love cannot justify keeping such a monster alive. Peter's grief is all-consuming, however, and he leaps to die by his son, reunited at last. After laughing for an hour and a half, I found suddenly that the chuckles caught in the throat.

De Palma does spin the mood right 'round for the finale, which outdoes Scanners a few years before Cronenberg's film even existed, but it's too late. After peeking out from behind the hedges in Obsession, the director's Romanticism enjoys an entire act of open, unabashed visibility, and this revelation raises The Fury above its somewhat plodding middle section. The middle showcases the most of De Palma's tricks, particularly focused around his way of visualizing Gillian's psychic flashbacks, which allow us to essentially watch a second movie within the already-tangled narrative, but he cannot yet find the right balance between his softer side and his more impish impulses. Nevertheless, The Fury boasts one of the finest performances in De Palma's filmography, and after making his reputation on so many wild satires, the sudden emergence of some tangible emotion hints at the humanity that would inform his best films.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie — Director's Cut

The director's cut of John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie omits the first scenes of its longer original cut, beginning with a shot of Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara) exiting his nightclub. This version immediately establishes its protagonist through mise-en-scène (with the club entrance subtly hinted to be a birth canal and the outside world a terrifying and unfamiliar reality) to the spare dialogue of Cosmo looking at the empty sidewalks around the club and reassuring the bouncer, after a pause, "All right, Vince. It'll pick up." Cosmo retreats back into the safety of the womb, away from a cold and sparsely populated world, but the damage is done: we know him instantly as both an optimist and a craven weakling, putting on a brave face to deal with the world before running back to the one section of it he can control.

This restructuring defines the greatest difference between the original cut, disliked by its director and star, and the taut director's version: the 108-minute edition instantly aligns the camera to the point of view of its slimy yet oddly lovable protagonist, moving the picture away from the more objective group studies Cassavetes made previously. Even the theatrical version of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie fits more readily into the director's classic style, its looser structure lending itself to even more asides than are present in the shorter version. But the director's cut ties Cassavetes' unique gift for finding the truth of humanity into a more subjective and personal style of filmmaking, centering on one character and his perception of the world around him rather than the real world's effect on multiple subjects.

That this transition should coincide with the false pretense of the director's move into more commercial filmmaking is all the more fitting. After A Woman Under the Influence scored well with critics and, more notably, audiences, Cassavetes's decision to make a gangster picture like the ones he used to act in to raise money for his own movies must have struck at least some of his fans as a crass exploitation of his Best Director nomination.

To be sure, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie contains all the elements of a crime picture: mafiosos, seedy clubs, gambling dens, etc. However, for all of the director's cut sleekness, the film is not, in either form, about anything so simple as a plot. In that single scene outside the club, the start of one cut and a few minutes in the other, Cassavetes makes this film about Cosmo and how Cosmo acts and reacts to events and how those events affect the way he sees the world and himself.

Through this subjective lensing, Cassavetes paints the underworld of the club backrooms through which Cosmo moves in a sickly, garish hue, using color filters and focal lenses to distort the image. Like a womb, the nightclub that Cosmo owns is dimly lit, oddly colored, stifling and sticky. But it's also safe, a place where Cosmo is the boss instead of the unremarkable schmuck, and he relaxes there the way he never does outside its doors, even before the plot catches up to him.

At the start of the film, Cosmo is in good cheer, paying off a long-standing debt to a loan shark (played, amusingly, by the film's producer), thus liberating himself to enjoy whatever profit the club turns for himself. To celebrate, he takes his three favorite dancers out for the night, only to wind up in a smoky room playing cards. Looking at Cosmo hunched over his hand, you can tell before someone comes to cut off his credit, before creditors come a few hours later to speak to him and long before they mention the $23,000 Cosmo now owes them that the club owner immediately got himself back into trouble. Clearly a cyclical occurrence, this new pile of debt does not openly faze Cosmo, who calmly assures the mobsters that he will repay them. (Interestingly, the gangsters draw up numbered forms and contracts as if legitimate money-lenders.)

Then again, nothing ever fazes Cosmo, which is something he's clearly worked at his entire life. He buries his Sicilian temper under the veneer of half-smiles and politeness, which the camera constantly frames in close-up in a futile attempt to pierce this stone wall. When his lover, Rachael, catches him leering over a nubile young girl auditioning as a dancer, she slaps him, nearly forcing that dormant anger to the surface. But Cassavetes and Gazzara deny us this easy (and premature) explosion, sending the scene into much darker territory where Cosmo keeps his cool by gently but horrifyingly forcing Rachael to drink liquor to calm her down. He must maintain order without outwardly losing his temper, even if his actions seem more sinister for his projected calm. Even his oily flesh appears to be a defense mechanism; everything in this film is oily, even for a '70s film -- if everyone in America had just run sponges over their body, the oil embargo would have never have been an issue -- but Cosmo is especially slick. As such, you can never tell if he's really sweating or just covered in product.

Cassavetes significantly influenced the early work of his friend Martin Scorsese, but Cosmo, and the rest of the picture, finds a bizarre but tantalizing balance between Scorsese's own Mean Streets, with its low-ranking and doomed street rat, and Taxi Driver, with its extremely subjective point of view as a man falls apart and loses himself to rage. The initial camerawork, filled with the director's trademark use of hand-held shots, aligns to the goofier, more lethargically tragic side of the club owner: the camera shakes even more than a typical hand-held shot as Cosmo stumbles from the bar back to his table, as if the camera is bobbing along to the trills of the joint's lounge trumpeter (or swaying to his drunken swagger). When Cosmo meets that lady who wants to try out for the Crazy Horse, Cassavetes cheekily shows her via an eyeline match, which lines up the frame to chiefly capture her breasts; when she auditions, we see only her legs. After the mobsters rope him into killing the titular bookie to repay his debt, however, the shaky movements reflect not just the tossing mental state of its protagonist but the pressure that begins to weigh down on him. The deeper into the situation Cosmo moves, the more he understands his fate, giving the shots both a paranoid, crippling fear and, at times, an odd serenity, a resignation and an acceptance of the world finally closing the tiny pocket it opened for Cosmo.

But no aspect of the mise-en-scène captures the truth beneath Cosmo's impenetrable facade than the show his club puts on every night. The cabaret act is a borderline disaster, shepherded by Cosmo's Felliniesque doppelganger, Teddy, a.k.a. Mr. Sophisticated. A lugubrious, pudgy wannabe, Teddy is Cosmo without the ability to deflect, accepting the audience's abuse as he fitfully attempts to add some talent to the proceedings, introducing song and dance numbers that fall apart instantly as the girls cannot remember their lines and the men in the crowd scream for the breasts to come out already. It's a show so wretched and slapdash that frankly nudity is the only thing that could salvage it, and Teddy somehow looks more confused and out of place when the women finally disrobe than he does trying to marshal them into a "classy" act.

The show is just one aspect of the film that works both as a nod to genre convention as well as a character-driven subversion of it. Even in the tightened version, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie contains numerous asides that appear to take away from the plot even as they serve both the story and Cosmo's own perception of it. On the way to kill the bookie, Cosmo's car breaks down in the middle of the road, an initially humorous "when it rains, it pours" situation made terrifying through Cassevetes' shots of incoming headlights growing brighter and larger than I've ever seen car headlights grow in a rear windshield. But that undercurrent of black comedy bubbles to the surface in the aftermath, as Cosmo goes to call a cab and, while still in the phone booth, calls the club to check in on the show. In the one-sided phone call, Gazzara never shifts the tone of panic and defeat but funnels it into high comedy by asking his workers what number the dancers are on before chewing them out for getting things wrong and for not knowing the show after years of practice ("Is it the Paris number?" he exasperatedly asks, before being forced to explain, "Are their cards on the wall reading 'P-A-R...?' "). The desperate humor, underscored by Cosmo's attempts to keep his calm as panic finally starts to take hold, continues when he goes to a diner to buy hamburgers to feed the bookie's guard dogs, at which point he gets into an argument with a waitress who wants to individually wrap the burgers to prevent a mess while Cosmo testily searches for excuses to just get it all in one greasy sack. None of these scenes is necessary in a strict sense, but they work both in maintaining the tension outside of sheer plot mechanics while continuing to burrow into the protagonist.

Cosmo does eventually carry out the task described in the title, but he understands instantly when he hears the footsteps of bodyguards approaching the scene of the crime that his target was more important than a mere bookie, and he knows that the Italian mob sold him out and double-crossed him before one of their representatives comes to chastise the poor man for killing a major player in the Chinese mafia as if he acted alone.

After barely escaping this setup with a bullet in the gut, Cosmo might be expected to open up for a final soliloquy, a "I coulda been a contender" moment. But it never comes. Instead, Cosmo manages to further lock down. Subtly, his actions communicate fear and a need for comfort, as he returns to Rachael and her mother, Betty, who have given him the only semblance of love and care (he even calls Betty "Mom"). He puts on a brave face, but Betty sees through him instantly: she actually cuts off what might have been the start of a generic monologue, damming the build-up of verbal diarrhea of Cosmo starting a winding story about his childhood by saying simply that she doesn't give a shit. With Cosmo unwilling to seek treatment for his wound, she won't indulge his disarming affability, not this time. She does not know the full story of what happened to Cosmo, nor does she care, and despite her affection for the man, she will not allow him to bring danger upon her and her daughter. The cold finality of this scene, its instant and brutal undercutting of hackneyed resolution and "Big Actor" moments, communicates more about this character and how even his loved ones view him than a speech ever could.

At last, Cosmo winds up back in his club for perhaps the last time, covering up his wound to buck up the people who depend on him, and suddenly his stoic endurance of the world's indifference to him seems less a self-serving measure as he applies it to inspiring those even worse off than him. With Teddy at an emotional nadir of self-revulsion, Cosmo pours whatever exists of himself into his doppelganger so that at least some form of him will live on. In his speech to Teddy and the dancers, Cosmo reveals truths about himself, saying "you gotta work hard to be comfortable" as he sits in the club he frantically held together for years just to feel relaxed in it. "I'm only happy when I'm angry," he says, "when I'm sad, when I can play the fool." But these are truths that their speaker does not fully comprehend, as he bares his true self to prove a point about needing to put on another face to deal with the world. (Cosmo frequently talks in such doublespeak and understatement, telling Betty, "I'm not feeling well, to tell you the truth" as he nurses his agonizing gut wound.) His employees take this message to heart, and Teddy even lauds Cosmo's ethos from the stage, calling the effort to achieve comfort, ironically though incessant, stressful work, the "best thing there is in the world."

Cassavetes does not show us Cosmo's ultimate fate, but we can guess from the scene of the club owner not simply announcing the show from backstage but heading out into the spotlight to introduce the act. Without directly, or even indirectly, letting on that this will his last night at the club, Cosmo emphasizes how this peeling, sticky den was his home, and his stumbling, awkward emceeing comes to serve as the joint's, and his own, benediction. After finishing, he stumbles away, probably to die alone, as Teddy comes to the stage and morosely performs his number, sure that the world hates him even as the audience begins to cheer. Teddy receives the open acceptance Cosmo never did, but like Cosmo he cannot recognize that affection. Even the existential despair common to so many noirs can scarcely touch the level of heartbreak in this moment.

Faces

Honest portrayals of American life on the big screen are few and far between. For every Killer of Sheep, there are a hundred more exploitative, facile breakdowns of society, gender, and race that perpetuate stereotypes more than they truly examine issues. Even when one does come along that appears to at least approximate life as we know it, these rare breeds typically come with a couched sociopolitical messages. Strange indeed is the film that just tries to be.

Of course, it is ironically those pictures that have more to say about life in both personal and public terms than those that try to encapsulate it. John Cassavetes' Faces is such a film. A subtle yet unflinching and harrowing look into the relationships between a group of men and women, Faces manages to get to the brutal truth not only of these couples but American society's inability to endow its people with a sense of fulfillment. Instead, we find ourselves locked into mores that are not that far removed from Victorian propriety.

Though the film employs a number of supporting characters almost as important as the leads themselves, the action centers around the slow crumbling of the 14-year long marriage between Richard and Maria Forst. The film opens with an extended dinner conversation between the Forsts and their friends, during which the tension of the couple rises to the surface in an increasingly hostile (yet still overly "friendly" chat). They all go our for drinks, the couple returns home and Richard proposes a divorce in one of the most casually vicious conversations I've ever seen.

The rest of the film follows the two as they each deal with the proposition in their own ways. Richard, sex-hungry and (in his mind, at least) emasculated, heads out with his businessmen friends, who promptly pick up some prostitutes. Richard gravitates towards Jeannie (played by Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes' wife), who in any other movie would be the hooker with a heart of gold but here has her own set of flaws and pettiness. Richard's attempts to woo her reveal a bit of gentleness in the otherwise hardened old man. He manages to disperse his two coarse buddies by mercilessly shutting down their racist jokes to establish himself as morally superior. With them out of the picture, you can see him slowly let down his guard for this total stranger. In Jeannie Richard finds a sort of liberation, perhaps a closeted reference to the sexual revolution that defined the time period.

Meanwhile, Maria goes out with her own friends to a local club, where they bemoan how they stand out amongst the younger women. They somehow rope a young gigolo named Chet and bring him back to the house. All the women flirt with Chet, but he sets his sights on Maria when she shyly shows an interest and the two wind up in bed together. That night Maria finally experiences real joy in her life, but the next morning is guilt-ridden and attempts suicide.

These two separate arcs go beyond an exploration of relationships and into a dissection of the fundamental differences between men and women. Even in the opening segment, the men clearly compete with one another for attention. Later, Richard engages in a sort of contest with his two friends in order to "win" Jeannie. For the men, it's all about the competition to get women; once you've bagged a lady there's no thrill left.

The women, on the other hand, deal with this harsh reality by martyring themselves. They go clubbing to forget their troubles, yet all they can do is talk about how old they look. Where Richard views his tryst with Jeannie as a triumph and a moment of clarity, Maria treats hers as a great transgression (which, to be fair, it is); however, she feels this way not out of remorse to her husband but because she's violated a societal code. Cassavetes clearly shows that, while it's a man's world, society's psychological impact on women has made many incapable of doing anything about it.

People could call the ending bleak, because it is. After all this frivolity, Richard and Maria settle back into their pathetic relationship, even though both have been changed by the experience. It's Cassavetes' final, savage blow to the audience, stating that the best we can hope for in this society is the simple realization that we're unhappy.

Faces works with any audience because the American ideal has become the romanticized template for social progress. Yet Cassavetes exposes the flaws of our system of aggressive individuality; the men must compete because every man must get ahead. It's all about the paycheck and the family unit. The women must "know their place" and loathe themselves after they reach 30 because by now they've been "won" and exhausted their "usefulness." The drive for personal wealth and success resulted in a society of sexism and self-defeat.

The title conveys a lot about the film and its meanings in only five letters. Pretty much all of film takes place in close-ups of talking heads, in which superficial people spit out their wearisome, worthless chat. But these words are also a face, a mask with which to disguise their deep regret and unfulfillment. Faces plays like a brazen mixture of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage and Jean Renoir's Rule of the Game, a searing look into relationships as well as a merciless commentary of a society on the edge of disappearing up its own rear. While it's not as good at exploring these separate topics as those other two, the fact that it manages to blend both elements seamlessly puts in right in their league. Make no mistake, Faces, like Cassavetes himself, should be regarded as a landmark of American cinema.