Funny, But True: On Cassavetes's Love Streams

LOVE STREAMS
(John Cassavetes, USA, 1984, 141 minutes)

With press screenings in full effect and the official opening on Thurs night, it's easy to overlook the non-SIFF films playing in town this month. That said, you've got one day left to catch John Cassavetes' penultimate feature at the Northwest Film Forum.

If you have any interest in Cassavetes' work, or that of the actor-filmmakers he's influenced, like Steve Buscemi (Trees Lounge) and Vincent Gallo (Buffalo 66, which features Cassavetes great Ben Gazzara), Love Streams should be mandatory viewing. Granted, Cassavetes isn't for everybody or, to quote Le Tigre, "Misogynist? Genius? Alcoholic! Messiah!" (1999's "What's Yr Take on Cassavetes?"). The answer is: All of the above.

I find his work both irresistibly compelling--the emotional rawness--and discomfortingly off-putting--the, um, emotional rawness--but mostly the former. Black and white jazz-saturated 1959 debut Shadows and 1976 Gazzara tour de force The Killing of a Chinese Bookie are my favorites.

Of course, I'm talking about Cassavetes, the writer/director. As an actor, he's terribly underrated, particularly in Roman Polanski's 1968 Rosemary's Baby--the ultimate controlling husband--and Robert Aldrich's 1967 adrenaline-fueled Dirty Dozen, for which he received a well deserved Oscar nomination. I'm also quite fond of his 1950s and 1960s work for small screen detective dramas, like Columbo, and anthology series, like Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Love Streams, meanwhile, may be flawed, but it's eminently worthwhile. In it, the late filmmaker (1929-1989) and his wife, Gena Rowlands, play middle-aged Los Angeles-based brother and sister Robert Harmon and Sarah Lawson, who have highly problematic relationships with the opposite sex--especially her husband, Jack (Seymour Cassel, another member of Cassavetes' esteemed troupe), their children, even pets--especially the goat!

The only people they get along with, and just barely at that, are each other. Cassavetes seem to be suggesting that if they weren't related, they'd be the perfect couple. Well, "perfect" may be a bit of a stretch, but the implication is that they could never possibly find anyone more understanding.

In real life, that seemed to be the case. Granted, the heavy-drinking, chain-smoking director can't have been the easiest human with whom to share a home, but he and Rowlands had great on-screen chemistry together, though you have to wait for it; they spend the first two-thirds of the film apart, and it wasn't until the last act that I realized they were playing siblings.

Co-written by Alan Herman, aka Ted Allan, and adapted from his 1981 play, Love Streams gives Rowlands one of her best roles and she runs with it. Sarah may be a loony, but she sure is fun to watch as she bowls in stockings and does back flips in Robert's pool. As it's a lunacy that possibly stems from actual mental illness, some critics have found her spontaneous hijinks hard to watch, but I thought the humor of the presentation made her desperation to be loved--even just to be noticed--a lot easier to take.

Though Jon Voight played Robert on stage, and signed on for the film, he dropped out due to "creative differences." It's just as well. Cassavetes nails the role of the endlessly drinking, constantly whoring, ultimately lonely novelist. Supposedly, he knew he only had a few years left to live. I don't know for certain that that's true--bad dye job aside, he doesn't look unwell. Five years later, however, he would succumb to cirrhosis of the liver.

In 1971's scrappy, low-budget Minnie and Moskowitz with Rowlands and Cassel, Cassavetes attempted to put his stamp on the romantic comedy to mixed results. Love Streams starts off as a much darker proposition, but becomes funnier and stranger as it goes along, and Rowlands gets all the best comic moments, while her dreams provide much of the strangeness.

Unlike some critics, I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but I'm glad I finally caught Love Streams on the silver screen, and would hate to see it get lost in the midst of the SIFF madness. Writer, director, and actor John Cassavetes, that "misogynist, genius, alcoholic, messiah," deserves no less.



Love Streams plays the Northwest Film Forum Thurs, May 25, at 7pm and 9:30pm. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave on Capitol Hill. For more information, please click here or call (206) 267-5380. Aug 2024 update: I neglected to identify the source of these images in 2006, but I know for certain that the last one comes from the original trailer.