Gena Rowlands, Remembered: An Immediate, Intimate, Truly One-of-One Talent

Gena Rowlands is, much like black coffee and Tom Waits, a taste you acquire as you get smarter. She attracts words like “formidable” and phrases like “a force of nature,” concepts that seem to be at odds with other emotions like “vulnerable” and “afraid” that she was able to uniquely conjure.

108 minutes into Faces (1968), the third of eight films she starred in for her husband John Cassavetes, there’s a scene where her character, a prostitute named Jeannie, blows raspberries in the neck of her john while making light, teasing banter. He asks her to stop “being silly” and “be herself” and suddenly it all comes clear how one person could be described in so many different, sometimes contradictory ways. Jeannie, in extreme close-up, a man’s hands framing her face, looks at that moment like a woman who has suddenly walked into an empty elevator shaft. Her expression freezes and she fills the emptiness with a hint of fatalistic grin and a vertiginous sense of a person who has resigned herself for a bad fall before some mad psychic pinwheeling pulls her back from the edge. She says too soberly, too quietly: “but I am myself, who else would I be?” She is drawing a line between what is permissible of herself to share and what is not. She is revealing the length of the tether she has used to affix herself to this world. She will walk to the very end of it, but not a step further and the tactile strength required of it to keep her from the abyss is not for anyone else to test.

Gena Rowlands was born in 1930 in Wisconsin and started her career on the stage, and then the screen, in a series of small roles as the beautiful blonde in various television shows including opposite Kirk Douglas in David Miller’s anti-western Lonely are the Brave (1962).  On her first date with fellow aspiring actor Cassavetes, he struck out by spending all of their time talking about his dog. She told him she was looking for someone who could talk about books and art, so he got educated and asked her out again. He was enthralled. He upbraided Roman Polanski on the set of Rosemary’s Baby for Polanski’s views on marriage and the impossibility of monogamy. As Mia Farrow remembers in her memoir:

“An impassioned John Cassavetes responded that Roman knew nothing about women, or relationships, and that he, John, was more attracted than ever to his wife, Gena Rowlands. Roman stared at him and blinked a few times, and for once had no reply.”

You can see Cassavetes’ devotion to Rowlands in every frame he shot of her. He lingers past the point where it makes narrative or tonal sense because he gets lost in the labyrinthine humanity of her. In Gloria (1980), easily the most accessible of their films together, watch how tough-as-nails mob gal Gloria (Rowlands) enters an apartment she hopes is safe for her and her six-year-old charge, opens a window to the street and leans out to see if they’ve been followed. We don’t see what she sees, we see her. The wind tousles her hair, pushes it into her face. And that face: her eyes just a little wide-set, more than just a little alive with a ferocious intelligence and voracious curiosity. She looks up the street, then down, then back again and because Cassavetes is so in love with her, we take in every plane on her face with him, every minute shift in attention, every thought that flicks across her face, and are in love with her, too.

But that’s not all of it, is it? How other people saw her? How Cassavetes shot her? Her gift was really in how she knew herself: her limitations and the scope and range of her extraordinary power. As an actress, she is like a great athlete, in intimate conversation with her extraordinary instrument and how far she could push it before it tore: how much stress she could put on it until it failed her and then crossing that line anyway because the goal was always one inch past what her body would allow, a pound heavier than her max, a second faster than her best. Because she is one-of-one, she didn’t let the limit to what she could do comfortably, without injury, with grace and beauty dictate what she would push herself to try. When people call her “courageous,” this is what they mean.

Rowlands told Cassavetes that she was afraid to play Mabel in the film for which she will be best remembered, A Woman Under the Influence (1974), and Peter Falk, her co-star in the film, remembered how afraid Cassavetes was of her performance — how afraid he was, too. Afraid of what? Its intensity, surely, and how Mabel experiences all the real ugliness of mental illness and how the people in her orbit are all pulled into the maelstrom of it like Dorothys and Totos into one-way cyclones to Oz — but what is really frightening about Rowlands as Mabel is how she steps over the line. She has a monologue late in the film in front of a fireplace which she begins before anyone knew the cameras were rolling, and even though every line of it is meticulously scripted — every actor blocked and some scenes shot upwards of fifty times to satisfy Cassavetes’ exacting vision — her castmates were afraid Rowlands had crossed over into Mabel. It’s fair to wonder about the title of the film. Before I saw it, I thought it was a Lost Weekend film about alcoholism and addiction. Now I think the “influence” refers to Rowlands being in sway to the overwhelming life force that animated her. Rowlands is the daredevil with a death wish. Sometimes, in front of a camera held by the person she trusted the most, she gave in to it and disappeared.

As veteran actress Myrtle in the other film for which she should be remembered, Opening Night (1977), she’s knocked off balance by the death of a fawning young fan, Nancy (Laura Johnson), clipped by a car as she runs after Myrtle in a downpour. Famous, admired, a legend who’s found a kind of immortality on the stage in the imitation of ageless characters, the sudden death of a person who knows her only for her personas causes her to question who she actually is — or if she’s anyone without the people she puts on like masks. The rest of the film is Myrtle’s process of self-abnegation, smashing her face against a door jam until her sunglasses shatter into her face, drinking herself into oblivion and hallucinating the ghost of Nancy in conflicts that finally escalate into a physical confrontation between Myrtle and the manifestation of her existential self-loathing. Rowlands is at the emotional and physical center of every scene. The film itself shifts between realities: the stage play Myrtle is in rehearsals for, the multiple dramas she enacts in her personal life with the same cast of characters, and then Rowlands herself as part of a difficult, personal project with her husband. Myrtle breaks the fourth wall repeatedly in the show-within-a-show, but Rowlands does, too, in these films she conceives and executes with Cassavetes, glancing at the camera — at us — to make sure we never forget exactly how much we are in her control. Opening Night is Mulholland Drive and Persona: a ghost story about a person who is only alive when she is observed. The rest of the time she’s Schrodinger’s Cat: she is many things at once and nothing, too. How do you play a ghost haunting your own life? 

Rowlands is immediate, intimate. She is uncomfortable and doesn’t care if she makes you uncomfortable, too. She is only ever herself and, like everyone else, she is messy. She breaks down noisily in A Woman Under the Influence and implodes quietly in Opening Night. In the astonishing Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), she falls in a cacophonous kind of love with the best kind of weirdo; in the melancholy Love Streams (1984), she manages her own depression by managing her lovelorn and lost brother’s despair. Through every iteration, she establishes guardrails around what she will tolerate. Her Myrtle reacts violently to being slapped — even in the course of playacting on stage; her Jeannie bristles at being called a prostitute and revels in the fight she starts between two of her suitors; her Gloria refuses to bend a knee to a band of assassins hell bent on killing a child in her protection. Watch how steely those eyes get when she needs to remind the men in her life about the rules of engagement. And then watch how the strain of maintaining her integrity causes this “force of nature” to crack into a hundred razor sharp, crystalline-bright pieces. She isn’t performing for your pleasure, she is pushing the boundaries of human connection and what is possible in this most elastic of mediums. Movies are very seldom asked to stretch this far, mainly because there was no one else like Gena Rowlands. 

Rowlands is Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and a little bit of Gloria Graham, and also Lauren Bacall and Marie Windsor. She describes herself twice in her roles as Humphrey Bogart. In reality, she was one-of-one. About an hour into my favorite Rowlands movie, Minnie and Moskowitz, Minnie stalks across a parking lot, through a set of glass doors, across a row of offices in the LA County Museum of Art and into a  gallery where she learns that the man with whom she’s been having an affair is breaking it off with her because his wife has tried to kill herself. He comes in for a kiss and Minnie slaps him across the face. There’s rage there, but there’s more than that. Cassavetes lingers on her as he does. As he can’t help himself but to do. What else? Rage and shock and… love. How do you convey love that is not lust, love that is angry and not enraptured, love when the man you love is terrible and you hate that you love him but you do? Watch all of Rowland’s intersections with service people in her films — how these day players with single lines are for a moment the star of their brief interactions with one of the most volcanic performers of all-time. Watch how hopeless iconoclast Moskowitz tells Minnie he usually eats alone and how Minnie processes that information, lights a cigarette and puts on her sunglasses. Anna Karina used to do things like this for Jean-Luc Godard… for herself, and for forever. “You’re so beautiful,” Moskowitz says in the middle of a rant and even with oversized sunglasses on, you can see Minnie tear up. How do you do that?

In Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), Rowlands plays a casting agent in the backseat of Corky’s (Winona Ryder) cab. Corky says something to her about wanting to find a man who will accept her like she’s Popeye: “I yam what I yam, you know what I mean?” and Rowlands gives that look she gives: the one that slices through pretense and across all time and defense, the one she aims just off screen in the middle distance where our hopes are, and says “I know what you mean.” Then she takes a drag on her cigarette while we catch our breath.

Gena Rowlands died on August 14, 2024. She changed everything before she went.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.