Opening Night

While knowledge and treaties, expectations and caricatures haunt her, as horrible people transmit their perspectives nonchalantly, striking yet stark, cutting yet insignificant, Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) prepares for Opening Night and artistically assails its cultural predisposition. A young fan is dead, struck by a car after having sought her attention. A brilliant role threatens her fluidity and unwittingly seeks to sequester her career. Friends offer advice which she refuses to indulge, instead choosing to transform its venom into a seductive performance, on her own terms. Is John Cassavetes a misogynist? He certainly presents how abrasive powerful men can be and how hard it must be for women to have to navigate a culture saturated with paternal misgivings, as they're expressed benevolently as if they represent some sort of divine goodwill, as if they reflect a woman's best interests. The psychological abuse Myrtle suffers directly presents the subtleties of a misogynistic discourse, thereby courting a misogynistic qualifier for the film. But it seemed to me as if Cassavetes was using misogyny to point out how trapped many women feel while championing a strong heroine who stoically and creatively endures and counters its virulence nevertheless, thereby realistically accepting its cultural and political prominence and productively demonstrating the herculean effort required to combat it. He's not playing softball and taking a walk through Central Park, he's presenting difficult and controversial material in order to capture the essence of a pervasive dark cultural tenant from which progress can be made (by those who accept his diagnosis and want to do something about it).

It's really quite ingenious.

Opening Night's a powerful film that doesn't bombard you with its thesis; rather, it modestly presents an artist struggling to maintain control of her craft while suffering a midlife crisis. The politics of performance and the relationship between strict adaptions of written material and inspired improvisations are dramatized within, and Myrtle's predicament (that of the successful female actress trying to preserve her identity in an industry dominated by masculine ideals) reflects that presented by several prominent Canadian journalists in regards to the feminine voice's place in 21st Century film. Rowlands's performance is strong enough to dig deep down into your psyche and propel you to feel what she feels, think what she thinks, as you desperately prepare to deliver the performance of a lifetime. On par with A Woman Under the Influence and stronger than Husbands and Faces, Opening Night delivers a play within a heroine within a film within a vision which courageously exposes a deep rooted cultural miscue.