Note: I’m often asked my pick for the best acting performance of all time, and I’m certain that my most-given answer has been Gena Rowlands in “A Woman Under the Influence.” It’s absolute, mesmerizing perfection.
ROBERT DANIELS
“When I was 18, I could do anything. My emotions were so close to the surface I could feel everything easily,” says Gena Rowlands. “But now, this is years later, plays later, years later.” It’s a line of dialogue in John Cassavetes’ “Opening Night,” delivered with a mixture of anxiety, doubt, and force that I often think about. “Opening Night” was the fourth film Rowlands collaborated on with her husband, made during her late-40s—a decade when life is in full swing for most, but signals a death knell for actresses. That tension lies at the center of Rowlands’ Myrtle Gordon, a stage actress struggling to wrap her hands around the part of an older woman who seems so unlike her but in reality is so incredibly close to her. She is further unmoored by the death of a young teenage fan, who, in a bid to gain Myrtle’s autograph following a show, was accidentally struck by Myrtle’s car. Now the image of that girl, a projection of Myrtle’s own youth seems to haunt the actress.
Writing about “Opening Night” through the lens of performance, Cassavetes and Rowlands’ creative and personal relationship, and Rowlands’ own approach to the craft guides one into conversations that the film has always invited. And yet, I can’t help but return to that line of dialogue. It happens in a discussion between Myrtle and the play’s writer Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell). Goode has arrived to calm Myrtle, who’s been reworking the script to fit a vision of herself. But what erupts in that half-finished line: “this is years later, plays later, years later”—is a revelation about craft. In the beginning, creatively, we are tapping into emotions to bolster the experience we do not have. As we age, learning tips, tricks and routines along the way, the craft takes over. Sometimes what is sacrificed is the pure, rare emotion—cast away as though it were a crutch. In “Opening Night,” Myrtle is searching for what she’s lost.
How much should the artist give of themselves to the art? When does a pound of flesh become the entire body and soul? Against Sarah, a strained, agitated Myrtle pleads that she has very little in common with the part: she isn’t married and doesn’t have kids. Acting is her life. Rowlands’ blue eyes are wide and wild. Framed in a medium shot, we see Rowlands’ body defensively tense up like a spring that doesn’t know where to pop. Cassavetes cuts to a closeup, and Rowlands’ expression has changed. There is a smirk when she leans in and says, “When I was 18, I could do anything,” the type from a person who until very recently had not questioned that an immense power still resided within. There are moments of quiet truth in her deliverance of these lines: her eyes nearly close in secrecy before opening large, where a glossy film of tear lies on the surface of the iris. There is melancholy in Myrtle’s confession. It’s the feeling that something has passed and may never return, that the sun has stopped spinning. It’s a feeling I can’t shake while knowing Rowlands, that actress as honest and as unflinching as the sun, is now gone.