SnoopyStyle
Famed actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) is starring in the new play "Second Woman". She is struggling with drink and stress. After a show, the group is driven back to the hotel. The car is stopped by an adoring fan who gets hit by traffic. Myrtle is horrified but they drive off. The rest of the group is more concerned with dinner. Myrtle is haunted by the young woman and then news come that she died. She is rejected by the grieving family. She goes to a seance. She starts to be literally haunted by her presence. Her performance gets ever more erratic as her drinking gets worst and she faces a crisis.This is an unpolished, raw performance and movie. I certainly prefer a lot more polish but there is no denying the raw power of Gena Rowlands. The other thing I would like is a play that I know. It may be more compelling for the play to be something well known. It would allow the film audience to understand when it's going off the rails. I feel similar to the audience walking out of the play with varying opinions. Obviously, I would like for this movie to be tighter and shorter but it may not be Cassavetes' taste.
RNQ
Over the top works of art can't be objectively judged. You ever crave it or you are sated. But if you want it, there's "Opening Night." If you start with a character holding a cigarette in her mouth, trying to take a drink from a flask, and hoisting shopping bags, and the actress has a mouth like Lauren Bacall, you are already at the edge of the roof. The movie that invited the characters to "fasten their seat belts" was already a calmer affair. Another comparison is "The Clouds of Sils Maria," where Juliette Binoche also plays an actress who likes to take a drink, may fly to extremes, but also controls it in the interests of a script or a public event. For Gena Rowlands in "Opening Night" there's no escape from a camera very close up, her character crashing. The ending, however, is like a satyr play at the end of an afternoon of tragedy.
wandereramor
Maybe it's just that I'm a sucker for movies about performance, but I really liked this one. There's a kind of rawness to the camera-work and the performances that makes the film impossible to turn away from. The story of the aging actress hounded by her fear of irrelevance is one that's been told a lot, but somewhere between Cassavetes' script and Rowland's acting it seems more visceral and real than ever before. This is a fun movie to think about, but it's not an intellectual exercise -- it kind of grabs you by the throat and rips your jugular out. Opening Night excoriates the reduction of Myrtle to her mere body while at the same time making itself and the viewer participants in it. It's a thoroughly uncomfortable but powerful move.Honestly, watching this movie is like discovering a whole secret history. Perfect Blue, one of my favourite movies, now seems like a direct cross-Pacific descendant to Opening Night. And then there's that Hold Steady song that makes so much more sense now.I think this review is a bit incoherent, but that's just the way this film makes me feel. If none of the above made sense, here's my opinion in a sentence: Not everyone is going to like Opening Night, but I think everyone should watch it nonetheless.
jzappa
I was absolutely blown away by John Cassavetes's Opening Night. It's the first movie of his that I've seen that seems to be on a bigger scale, thus it feels more mainstream, but it still doesn't feel as if he grounded himself any more than he has in his previous films. That is perhaps what makes it so intense. There is also something undoubtedly cathartic about watching this movie.It's about what in fact Cassavetes has made a staple of his career, an ideal that he has expressed behind the camera throughout his career as a director and is here expressing it in front. Rowlands's character, middle-aged stage actress Myrtle Gordon, cannot bring herself to play her role in the upcoming production as written so she uncalculatedly follows impulse after impulse, resulting in what appears to be chaos on stage, until she finds the right one. It's a daringly abstract premise.This is a movie that does not fail to capture the innate steering that one goes through during an emotional cleansing. No one understands why Myrtle does many of the things she does, and it is seen and even portrayed as something destructive, yet it just might be the best thing for her. It may be a cleansing rather than a breakdown. A withdrawal, a cocoon, a rebellion, it all culminates into a meltdown. Cassavetes gives her character a brutally real touch, which is that early on, she is ardently arguing that she has nothing in common with her character, yet she is in quiet but emotionally corroding fear that the opposite is true.The last scene, the climactic performance that Myrtle shares with a character painfully estranged from her who is acting with her, is one of the most interesting, hilarious, hard-hitting, enlightening, and enjoyable moments I've ever seen in a movie.
AD
