Zach Vasquez
When Gena Rowlands passed away last month at the age of 94 after a prolonged battle with Alzheimer’s, the tributes zeroed in on one role in particular: A Woman Under the Influence. This was entirely to be expected; as Mabel Longhetti—a blue collar housewife who is driven over the edge of sanity by both her mental problems and as the expectations of her family and society at large—she is widely considered to have given one of the very best performances of the New Hollywood era. The role would earn Rowlands the first of her two Oscar nominations (alongside her title performance in the crime drama Gloria; she was given an honorary Oscar in 2015).
And yet, amongst fans of the actor—described by New Yorker critic Richard Brody as “the most inventive, creative, original, transformative actress in the history of cinema”—there is another role that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Mabel: that of Myrtle Gordon, from 1977’s Opening Night.
Released only three years after Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night was the fourth collaboration between Rowlands and director/husband/creative soulmate John Cassavetes. As Myrtle, Rowlands plays a famous and acclaimed actress preparing for her role as—what else?—a woman undergoing a breakdown in a new stage drama called, appropriately, The Second Woman.
Despite sharing the character’s apprehension about middle age, Myrtle finds she just can’t relate to anything in the script. This puts her at odds with the play’s director (Cassavetes regular Ben Gazzara), its writer (Golden Age star Joan Blondell), and her co-star/ex-lover (Cassavetes), which, combined with the shock of witnessing a fatal car accident outside of the theater following the first preview of the play that leaves a young fan dead, leads her to start cracking-up herself, losing, as she puts it in her most bravura scene, “the reality of the reality.” Soon she begins to experience visitations from the ghost of the young fan—a beautiful blonde who reminds her of herself at 18, a time, she reminisces, when “I could do anything. My emotions were so close to the surface I could feel everything easily.”
Cassavetes’s style is often described as realism, which is understandable considering the emphasis on naturalistic performance, but this gives short shrift to the often dreamlike and subtle surrealism on display throughout them. In no movie does this come more to the fore than in Opening Night, which, at times, plays like an outright supernatural horror movie. And yet, Rowlands, in every one of her scenes—whether she’s having an intimate conversation with her director about the everyday indignities of aging, being physically assaulted by an unseen spectral force, or drunkenly barreling her way through the material onstage (and let it be said: no one in the history of American cinema has ever played as convincingly drunk as Rowlands in this film)—keeps things entirely grounded. This is a towering performance, but it is not a hammy one. It is achingly real, even when the film around it crosses over into magical realism.
It would not be accurate to call Opening Night autobiographical, at least not any more so than any of the other work Rowlands did with her husband. A number of their films, including their breakthrough feature, Faces; their biggest success, Influence; and their final film together, Love Streams; were all shot in their real life home in Los Angeles l, while several co-starred her mother and their children. But it is clearly inspired by some of what Rowlands was going through at the time, as an actress aging out of many of the top roles Hollywood (or in the film’s case, Broadway), had to offer (Rowlands was 47 when Opening Night came out). But this is no mere takedown of entertainment industry beauty and age standards. Like her husband, Rowlands was a capital-A artist, one who literally put her money where her mouth was by self-funding the majority of the movies they made together.
Thus, the emotional struggle at the center of Opening Night has less to do with Myrtle’s job prospects than her ability to call upon the vitality that has allowed her to hone and perfect her craft up to that point. There are countless movies that examine the anxieties of artists, but few that dive as deep into them as Opening Night.
Whatever vitality is lacking in Myrtle, it certainly wasn’t lacking in Rowlands. Opening Night failed to connect with audiences or critics at the time of its release, although it has since been recognized as the major work it is. Rowlands and Cassavetes would go on to make two more movies together—the aforementioned Gloria, for which she received a second Oscar nom, and Love Streams—before his death from cirrhosis of the liver in 1989. In both of those movies, as in Influence and Opening Night, Rowlands played characters who refuse to conform to the expectations and rules of their slice of society. Their rebellion sometimes leads to widespread destruction, and at other times transcendence. By the end of Opening Night, Myrtle has achieved both.
No one was better at playing this than Rowlands, because even when the characters she gave life to were falling over the edge or slipping into dreamstates, she always managed to hold onto the reality of the reality.
“Opening Night” is screening tonight at the Paris Theater in NYC. It is streaming on the Criterion Channel and Max.
