Love Streams

John Cassavetes's penultimate picture (and his last movie with his wife and most prominent collaborator, Gena Rowlands) was almost his final film as he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver right before shooting commenced—though he kept this information secret from everyone involved in the production. Love Streams is an inferior work compared to Cassavetes' great achievements like Shadows, Faces, Husbands, Opening Night, and his masterpiece A Woman Under the Influence, but critics who subscribe to the Auteur Theory hail it as the great maverick director's final masterpiece. Of course, Cassavetes could have crapped out pretty much anything, as long as it was true to his style of working and not some job-for-hire like his actual last movie, Big Trouble, and Auteurists would have found as much to praise about it as they have for this jumble of scenes and ideas grafted onto a play by Ted Allan that Cassavetes had earlier directed for the stage.

Gena and John play brother and sister in Love Streams, but we're not told that for at least the first hour, so we are intentionally kept in the dark about how each character we meet is connected to the others. Cassavetes's Robert Harmon and Rowlands's Sarah Lawson are emotionally wounded individuals who have not seen each other for many years and reunite after their loved ones abandon them. They slowly find themselves relying on one another more and more. Robert is a nihilistic, alcoholic, playboy novelist in a shaky relationship with a singer, played by Diahnne Abbott (best known at the time as Robert De Niro's wife and for playing Rupert Pupkin's would-be girlfriend in The King of Comedy). Early in the film, Robert gets a visit from his ex-wife, who forces him to take charge of their eight-year-old son for the day, even though Robert has not seen the kid since his birth. Though he only needs to mind the boy for 24 hours, he decides to take the terrified youngster on a road trip to Las Vegas. While disturbing, this is one of the movie's best sequences, and it shows us everything we need to know about Robert. But Cassavetes has several more scenes in store for us that showcase what an unpleasant and irresponsible guy his character is.

The film also features Cassavetes-regular Seymour Cassel as the husband divorcing Rowlands's Sarah. Cassel sports the same bushy mustache he had in Minnie and Moskowitz, the 1971 Cassavetes film in which Rowlands and Cassel play a dysfunctional couple who end up getting married. Leslie Hope plays Sarah's daughter, who has had it with her mother's emotional instability and no longer wants to live with her. Both these characters seem like they're going to be important, but they ultimately matter about as little as Susan, the nightclub singer played by Abbott. Susan, a principal character in the source play, was dropped from the film early into shooting when Cassavetes decided the screenplay adaptation he and Allan had written was contrived, and he struggled to create something "true" instead. People who love semi-improvised movies like this seem to confuse the reality of production with cinematic reality, and when a genius maverick auteur doesn't strike gold, he inevitably ends up with something a whole lot more contrived than a hacky screenplay. That's the case here. I totally understand deviating from the planned script and allowing the movie to go in the direction it needs to go, but when you do that, you then need to shape it into something coherent in the editing room, not just string together everything you filmed.

For example, after having the second half of her scripted material cut from the shooting schedule, Abbott wrote a scene for herself to give her character some closure. She pressured Cassavetes to shoot it, and he told her to come to his house the next day. He also invited his buddy, Peter Bogdanovich, over and casually asked the Oscar-nominated filmmaker to direct him and Abbott in the pages she had written. That scene makes it into the film's final cut, but why? Including this scene makes no sense other than the meta-rationale that it feels real to have an actress in character telling off a director, also in character, whom she feels has not served her well. For that matter, why include any of the scenes with Abbott? They add little to the picture. Why does a 2+ hour movie about a brother and sister feature the brother starting up a relationship with a singer and then drop that thread altogether? Are some of Abbott's scenes interesting? Sure—especially one where Robert comes to Susan's house and gets drunk with her mother (played by Abbott's actual mother, Margaret Abbott) until Susan comes home with another man. But come on, what new information does this give us about Robert? Auetorists will say we are witnessing a genius filmmaker "finding the story" he wants to tell. People who love films more than filmmakers will say, we're watching an assembly of footage that no one has bothered to refine into a coherent picture.

I didn't know this behind-the-scenes story when I first saw Love Streams, but learning about it and many others confirmed why I had such a negative initial reaction to the movie. It's much more a film about a filmmaker's journey than a character's. If Love Streams ultimately ends up as a character study about a narcissistic, abusive drunk who only has love for his sister, I get how seeing Robert play out the same basic scene over and over makes a point about how people like this don't really change. But why, then, does the sister also have no narrative arc? Sarah starts at one place and ends up exactly where she started. Maybe that's "real," but I'm not sure it's a story.

Rowlands is always a fascinating actor to watch, but she's at sea in this film. Often, she seems to be playing Sarah as if she were Mabel Longhetti, her character from A Woman Under the Influence—arguably the greatest performance by an actress ever committed to celluloid. At other times, Sarah's "kookiness" comes across as a bad parody of the iconic Mabel. I do love the extended sequence in which Sarah buys a bunch of farm animals and transports them in a taxi to live in Robert's mansion in the hope that he will be able to give love to these living creatures. I just wish we got to good stuff like that before I had long since stopped caring about these people. When Cassavetes then starts to indulge in surrealism and dream sequences, the movie really falls off whatever rails it was on.

Love Streams came courtesy of those producing stalwarts of the 1980s, Golan & Globus, whose Cannon Films also gave us, in '84 alone, Breakin', Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, Missing in Action, Ordeal by Innocence, Bolero, Making the Grade, Sahara, Exterminator 2, Ninja III: The Domination, Sword of the Valiant, The Naked Face (which Menahem Golan directed himself), and the documentary "I'm Almost Not Crazy ..."—John Cassavetes: The Man and His Work, which is basically a shameless sixty-minute promotional film for Love Streams. Much as I dislike this movie, I'm glad the two schlockmeisters made an attempt to up their prestige level, which they did by financing Cassavetes. Golan & Globus were smart to realize that Oscar bait can make money as much as endlessly recycled sequels to sub-par pictures. That didn't happen in this case, but it's still good that they gave it a try.