{"id":10500,"date":"2018-10-29T05:00:29","date_gmt":"2018-10-29T09:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=10500"},"modified":"2019-01-12T14:40:53","modified_gmt":"2019-01-12T19:40:53","slug":"woody-who-another-woman-belongs-to-gena-rowlands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/woody-who-another-woman-belongs-to-gena-rowlands\/","title":{"rendered":"Woody Who? Another Woman<\/i> Belongs to Gena Rowlands"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the 35 years Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes were married (from 1954 until his death in 1989), she starred in seven of the dozen features he directed and appeared un-billed in two others. With their outsized characterizations and heightened emotions (fueled, more often than not, by heavy alcohol consumption), Cassavetes\u2019 films were showcases for his actors and attracted a stock company of performers who relished being able to go as big as they wanted \u2013 as long as they were being truthful. Since the majority of his projects were self-financed and independently distributed, Cassavetes also had no qualms about using unfamiliar faces and non-actors in pivotal roles.<\/span><\/p>\n

Such demonstrativeness was less common in the dramas Woody Allen started turning out with 1978\u2019s Interiors<\/i>, his Ingmar Bergman-inspired follow-up to Best Picture winner Annie Hall<\/i>. By the time he made Another Woman<\/i><\/b> a decade later \u2014 30 years ago this month \u2014 Allen had found his own voice as a dramatist, even if he still produced the occasional dud like 1987\u2019s September<\/i>, the first version of which he scrubbed because he thought changing out some of the actors would help make its leaden story come to life. (Spoiler: It did not.) With Another Woman<\/i>, though, he gave Rowlands a plum role as a philosophy professor so closed off from her emotions that she\u2019s blind to how others see her and how little she knows about herself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Compared to Rowlands\u2019 Oscar-nominated performances in her husband’s A Woman Under the Influence<\/i> and Gloria<\/i> or her live-wire turn as the emotionally unstable actress in his Opening Night<\/i> (in which her character is starring in a play called The Second Woman<\/i>), Another Woman<\/i>\u2019s Marion Post is as controlled as you can get. This is signified by the tightly braided hairstyle she wears through most of the film, assuring she hardly ever has a strand out of place. In fact, the only times she\u2019s seen with her hair down (albeit in a ponytail) are the flashbacks to the time right before she married her current husband, Ken, played by Ian Holm with an icy reserve to match hers. (Interestingly, at one point Ben Gazzara was considered for the role, which would have doubled the Cassavetes alum quotient.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The impetus for Marion\u2019s introspection and trigger for many of her flashbacks\/memories is an \u201cacoustical anomaly\u201d that allows her to eavesdrop on the therapy sessions being conducted in the apartment next to the one she\u2019s rented to have a distraction-free place to write. The patient she\u2019s most intrigued by is a pregnant woman named Hope (played by Allen\u2019s then-partner Mia Farrow, who actually was pregnant\u00a0 <\/span>with Ronan Farrow), who is in essence the film\u2019s second narrator alongside Marion, whose voice-overs are used to orient the viewer in her privileged world and identify the people in it. In contrast, Hope uses analysis to express her anxieties and regrets, which mirror Marion\u2019s in ways that surprise her.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chief among Marion\u2019s regrets is her rejection of novelist Larry Lewis (Gene Hackman), who tried to lure her away from Ken during their engagement party. An awkward situation, to be sure, but it\u2019s nothing compared to the unexpected arrival of Ken\u2019s ex-wife, who\u2019s understandably bitter about the whole thing. \u201cI realize you\u2019ve been hurt,\u201d Ken tells her, \u201cand if I\u2019ve done anything wrong, I\u2019m sorry. Forgive me. I accept your condemnation.\u201d This well-rehearsed speech, intended to neutralize his ex-wife\u2019s anger, is echoed later on in the scene where Marion, having done some soul-searching, confronts him about their nonexistent sex life. This time, however, Ken is delivering it to an audience of one, and she doesn\u2019t realize the almost word-for-word repetition is a sure sign he\u2019s been cheating on her until she actually catches him with another woman.<\/span><\/p>\n

Marion\u2019s journey to self-realization, however, begins much earlier, with her pursuit of Hope, her own \u201cother woman.\u201d Impulsively following her on foot one night, Marion winds up running into an old friend, actress Claire (Sandy Dennis), who bursts her bubble by telling her point-blank that they didn\u2019t \u201cjust drift apart\u201d the way she thinks. \u201cI withdrew,\u201d Claire says, firmly and decisively, leaving Marion to consider how many of her other personal relationships she\u2019s misinterpreted and dropped the ball on. She even imagines that her stepdaughter Laura (Martha Plimpton), who she\u2019s told idolizes her, finds her judgmental. \u201cShe just sort of stands above people and evaluates them,\u201d Laura says while a stunned Marion looks on.<\/span><\/p>\n

As clearly and concisely as Marion expresses herself verbally, she reveals herself the most in the scenes where she\u2019s listening to other people and every emotion she\u2019s feeling has to play out on Rowlands\u2019 face. She makes her greatest breakthrough, though, during the 10-minute dream sequence (which is announced as such in voice-over to head off any potential confusion) that shows how many things from her past have been eating away at her subconscious. (This sequence also allows Rowlands to literally cede the spotlight to Dennis, however briefly.) Then, and only then, is she ready to make a one-on-one connection with Hope, who she meets by chance while shopping for an anniversary present. \u201cCan I help you?\u201d Marion asks, but by this time the viewer is well aware that Marion is the one in desperate need of assistance.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is brought home in the subsequent scene where Marion overhears Hope telling her therapist about the \u201creally sad woman\u201d she just met. \u201cA woman you\u2019d think would have everything, but she doesn\u2019t. She has nothing.\u201d By saying out loud what Marion has begun to suspect but can\u2019t put into words, Hope gives her the final push she needs to cut the philandering Ken loose and move on with her life. And since her building\u2019s ventilation system has done its job, Marion reports the problem to her neighbor so he can get it fixed and she can write in peace \u2013 and with true peace of mind.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the time of its release, Another Woman<\/i> received mixed reviews and did poorly at the box office. (After September<\/i>, it\u2019s Allen\u2019s lowest-grossing film from his Orion period.) And while some of the critics savaged it (Jonathan Rosenbaum declared it a \u201cpiece of posturing phoniness,\u201d Vincent Canby called its characters \u201ctalking automatons\u201d), they had nothing but the highest praise for Rowlands\u2019 work. Indeed, as Roger Ebert wrote in his glowing, four-star review, \u201cGreat actors and great directors sometimes find a common emotional ground, so that the actor becomes an instrument playing the director\u2019s song.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In spite of the effusive praise she received \u2014 or perhaps because of the scandals that rocked Allen\u2019s personal life just a few years later and continue to dog him today \u2014 Another Woman <\/i>turned out to be a one-off for Gena Rowlands. Her one-time director did reprise the film\u2019s eavesdropping theme, though \u2014 in an overtly comedic fashion \u2014 with 1996\u2019s Everyone Says I Love You<\/i>. By sheer coincidence, that was the same year Rowlands starred in Unhook the Stars<\/i>, the directorial debut of her son, Nick Cassavetes, whose biggest hit to date has been \u2014 wait for it \u2014 2014\u2019s The Other Woman<\/i>. Some things you just can\u2019t make up.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the 35 years Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes were married (from 1954 until his death in 1989), she starred […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":463,"featured_media":10501,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}