Cinema: Excess Baggage

LOVE STREAMS Directed by John Cassavetes Screenplay by Ted Allan and John Cassavetes

Of all the women who have given up at least a portion of their careers for marriage and children, Gena Rowlands may have got the best deal. For her husband John Cassavetes makes small, eccentric movies almost entirely comprising sublime (or would-be sublime) actor's moments that he parcels out among family and friends. In recent years he has seen to it that his wife gets a very fair share of these. The result is that with such pictures as A Woman Under the Influence, Minnie and Moskowitz and Gloria she has had an opportunity vouchsafed few mainstream actresses these days: she has been allowed to create a true screen character.

Vulnerable, brave and loopy−a panicky paradigm of middle-age desperation−this creature is again on glorious display as Sarah in Love Streams. In it, Cassavetes also creates an answering male character, Sarah's brother, who has taken up womanizing in an attempt to ward off the chill he feels gathering in his bones. It is not an entirely successful characterization, partly because such males have become a cliché, but mostly because Cassavetes, the obsessed film maker, does not really understand certain less exalted obsessions that may distractingly come upon a man. His character neither fully focuses nor finally explodes.

Rowlands' Sarah does. She is a woman of excess, whose efforts to rid herself of that quality are, needless to say, marred by excessiveness. She loves her husband and daughter to pieces, and when we meet her at a divorce hearing she is sweetly, distractedly explaining that she cannot be too precise about times and dates when her mate can visit their child; they have this busy schedule flying about the country, visiting sick and dying relatives. Later, trying to forget her troubles by touring Europe, she is undone by excess baggage.

Naturally. Landing finally at her brother's place, she decides that the cure for his glum raffishness must be pets on whom he can practice a responsible form of loving. Forthwith, she goes out and buys a menagerie of ducks, a goat, an affably neurotic dog and a pair of miniature horses that trot, puzzled but agreeable, through the house. It is as she tells her psychiatrist: "I'm going to get my balance. Then I can go back to being obsessed with my family."

When she is not present there are−a familiar problem with Cassavetes−too many approximations of a scene's emotional point, too many claims on an audience's indulgence. Yet no matter how far the mind strays, one never feels safe in letting it slip away completely. You can never tell when Rowlands is going to do something astonishing. It is the unpredictable grace and goofiness of her behavior, the subtle complexity of emotions she generates, that finally overcome all obstacles to enthrallment.