Billed as a romantic "fable," it's full of crack-brained malcontents, and sitting through it is a bit like being trapped for a couple of hours with a barfly. Sean Penn plays Eddie, a two-bit dreamer who has been in and out of mental wards. Eddie is crazy-in-love with his wife Maureen (Robin Wright Penn), whose pregnancy has sent him into a tizzy; he stays away from their rathole apartment for days at a time. Maureen is also crazy-in-love with Eddie. We get the point: Love is crazy.
It was ever so in John Cassavetes-ville. His most acclaimed film, A Woman Under the Influence, featured Rowlands's Mabel Longhetti as a mother and housewife coming apart; her dissolution was romanticized as a "higher" form of sanity.
For Cassavetes, the excesses of mania defined drama, and he drew on those excesses with a performer's passion. As a writer-director he was essentially serving the rhythms and intuitions of the performing process, and many of his films, although scripted, had the freeform dreariness -- and occasional psychological revelation -- of acting exercises. The Cassavetes rat pack, notably Rowlands, Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassell, and Cassavetes himself, mumbled and growled and boozed their way into a deeper "truth" than you could get from more traditional movies.
At least that was the game plan. I always thought Cassavetes's no-pain-no-gain dramaturgy was a long sit. It wasn't just a performer's passion he was putting on display but a performer's psychotherapy as well; his movies were grounded in the assumption that, in stripping off a character's guises, you were getting the essential person. There's a deep reverence for letting go in his movies, for giving it all up for love. What some of us found so off-putting about his films was the extraordinary self-indulgence of that love. In the movies, as in life, not every blowhard deserves a hearing.
Much is being made in the press about the wonderfulness of resurrecting an unfilmed John Cassavetes screenplay. But surely, as he would probably be the first to agree, Cassavetes's scripts were not his prime calling cards. (I would be more excited if someone resurrected, say, a long-lost script by Preston Sturges or Ben Hecht.) A Cassavetes script was a blueprint for pulling apart his actors and then trying to put them together again.
And in She's So Lovely, they sure do pull apart. The reason this film is being fobbed off as a fable must be that its people are so suffocatingly screwy. They exist in a hyped-up continuum in which all human emotion becomes fetishized as an acting exercise. By letting out all the stops in a bullheaded quest for a "greater" truth, She's So Lovely comes across as inhumane, derelict.
No one in the film, for example, ever raises the red flag on the pregnant Maureen's boozing -- certainly not Eddie. Their undying love for each other is mostly a matter of indulging their excesses, because that's what true love is in John Cassavetes's world. When Eddie discovers that a boorish neighbor roughed up Maureen, he packs a pistol and ends up killing a paramedic, yet the emphasis in this episode is all on poor, forlorn Eddie. He did it for love. He's killed somebody, and yet he's still being propped up as a love-struck saint.
She's So Lovely divides evenly in two. In the second section Eddie, released after ten years in a mental hospital, rejoins Maureen, who has three daughters and a new, well-to-do husband, Joey (John Travolta) and lives in the suburbs. She's cleaned up her act, but she's still in love with Eddie. He's been in a fog for ten years and thinks he's been hospitalized for only eight months. Their reunion is one of those protracted knock-down drag-out Cassavetes affairs that, again, smacks of an essential inhumanity. Eddie and Joey tussle on the suburban lawn, with a gun about to go off and Eddie's nine-year-old daughter looking on, but the scene is played for yucks, with jaunty music on the soundtrack.
Sean Penn is trying to locate the frailty inside Eddie's dazed swagger. He's touching, which is more than this film deserves, but his character has no emotional continuity. Discharged from the mental hospital, Eddie is almost completely out of it, and yet he recovers almost immediately when it comes time to reconnect with Maureen. If the film had established the cycle of Eddie's manic phases or demonstrated his recuperative powers, his lickety-split recovery might not seem like such a glitch. (It's as though the projectionist skipped a reel.) But Cassavetes -- Nick and John -- probably figured Eddie's manic phases are untraceable anyway. For them, a little thing like character development, even if the character is cracked, would be distinctly "unromantic."
Unhook the Stars had some fine human touches and a performance by Rowlands that was very different from her grandstanding psychodramatics in John's films. In She's So Lovely, Nick Cassavetes doesn't mimic his father's directorial style, the way his camera operated as a kind of homing device for the actors' every twitch and tussle. He's a much more straightforward filmmaker but, in visual terms, he's trying to achieve clarity with material that defies it. As a result, the actors all seem isolated by their shenanigans.
The absurdity of what they are being asked to do comes to us unimpeded by the usual John Cassavetes accessories: the "raw" cinematography and joy-riding camerawork. And so the actors, in their isolation, seem doubly absurd. Robin Wright Penn is doing the Rowlands blowsy-angel bit, but she's so mannered she might be competing for Jennifer Jason Leigh's crown. Penn, perhaps to match her, piles up the mannerisms too. Travolta, who seems to be appearing in every third movie these days (is he afraid Hollywood will forget him again?) is also uncharacteristically actor-ish; perhaps he didn't want to be left out. He does things like say tink for think, just so we know Joey's an up-from-the-streets kind of guy.
Only Harry Dean Stanton, playing Eddie's best friend, comes across as a recognizable human being. Stanton is amazing; I don't think I've ever seen him give a bad performance. Oblivious to the human zoo in She's So Lovely, he quietly goes his own way. His down-home resonance is more than a breath of fresh air; it's the only gulp of oxygen in the entire movie.
She's So Lovely.
Written by John Cassavetes; directed by Nick Cassavetes; with Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, John Travolta, Harry Dean Stanton, and Debi Mazar.
