**/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel, Val Avery, Timothy Carey
written and directed by John Cassavetes
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The experience of seeing Minnie and Moskowitz is like asking for a glass of milk and receiving a tequila shooter. Both might do good things for you in separate circumstances, but they are far from interchangeable. Similarly, the simple pleasures of a boy-meets-girl movie and the method bombast of John Cassavetes have their times and places, but they run on entirely different schedules. When the two actually collide, as they do in Minnie and Moskowitz, the cataclysm is so great it cancels out anything good that might have come from either one staying on their own turf: the wispy romance plot is mangled beyond all recognition and the soulful Cassavetes style is left pounding on the walls, resulting in a singularly unpleasant parade of standard cliché and acting overkill that leaves neither side standing by the end.
Things begin promisingly as we meet our two protagonists, Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands) and Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel), as they navigate the lonely trials that are their lives. Minnie, trapped in an abusive relationship with a married man (an unbilled Cassavetes), complains to a friend (Elsie Ames) that movies "set you up" to expect something more than the disappointments that life will hand you; while she is well-off with a job at a museum, there is a void in her life which she is ill-equipped to reckon with. Meanwhile, in New York, Seymour, a parking-lot attendant with a capricious streak, has a knack for chatting up the other lonely denizens of the city, as when he attempts to change a bitter, fat man (Timothy Carey) he meets in a greasy spoon. Both of these characters have so much to give and receive so little in return that our hopes are raised the film will deal with the theme of loneliness in a compelling way.
Then Seymour moves to California, and the movie goes straight to hell. Our heroes' paths cross one day when Minnie is on a blind date set up by a co-worker. The date (Val Avery) turns out to be a desperate and needy loudmouth who also possesses a large-sized mean streak. He is restrained from violence by Seymour, who packs up Minnie in his age-old pickup truck and speeds her to safety. We think we are safe from the pathetic man who has shouted his way out of Minnie's good books, but then the ugly truth sets in: Seymour is every bit as loud and every bit as pathetic as the man he just left in the dust. When he decides, right on the spot, that he loves Minnie and wants to spend the rest of his life with her, his outpouring of "feeling" borders on the threatening. And so he launches into a frenzy of shouted declarations and overly demonstrative behaviour, all designed to win over the reluctant but strangely interested Minnie.
It's hard to classify exactly where this film went wrong. If a traditional romance is what Cassavetes had in mind, he should have known that his style was completely wrong for the task at hand. What the genre calls for is a light touch, an ability to capture moments of tenderness and revel in the chemistry of the leads, and it is this touch that Cassavetes had never been able to provide. His films deal with emotional extremes, with people who are at the end of their ropes and can only communicate through lashing out, and much of the time, he pulls it off. Even here, there are flashes of brilliance as he coaxes extreme portrayals of desperate characters, such as the widowed and desperate man who is Minnie's blind date, who strenuously tries anything he can to make her like him even as he pushes her further and further away. But the combination of light genre and heavy director results in a cringe-inducing series of shouted declarations and embarrassing situations, as the implacable Seymour tries over and over again to make his love apparent to the ambivalent Minnie.
Try as one might, one can't think of any possible reason why Minnie would fall for someone like Seymour, and vice versa. Seymour's main seduction technique is to shout his lines at the top of his lungs, over and over again, until they sink into Minnie as if through osmosis. Completely single-minded, he repeats the fact that he is in love with her, that he can't live without her, and that he knows she loves him too. ("I love you so much that sometimes I forget to go to the bathroom!" he announces.) He doesn't romance her so much as instruct her as to the reality of his love, and one can't imagine why she doesn't just walk away from this obnoxious bully. By the same token, one can't imagine why someone as hyper and extreme as Seymour would look twice at the society lady that is Minnie. She seems way too reserved for his tastes, and when he begins his courtship-by-flamethrower, it seems that both his interest and her reciprocation happen because the script says so and not because they actually feel a bond.
Given that the link between the two is tenuous at best, it should come as no surprise that the actors have no idea of how to bring them to life. If Cassavetes had stuck to the (admittedly restrictive) romance playbook, he might have instructed the actors to use a lighter touch, letting the relationship begin gently and build as the movie rolls on. But he chafes too much at these rules, and instructs Rowlands and Cassel to go full-tilt and to the max. Thus the already extreme behaviour of Seymour goes straight through the roof as he bellows his underwritten dialogue about how much he loves Minnie, while Minnie politely listens, constantly reaching for her sunglasses, a big cue that she is trying to defend herself. Between Cassel's bellowing and Rowlands's constant tics, an already suspicious storyline is rendered completely intolerable. The actors don't bring these people to life–they apply method clichés to their roles. The result is deep embarrassment for them as they strenuously plug away at their roles, even as the structure collapses around them and the emotions become painfully forced.
Ironically enough, Cassavetes manages to upstage his own movie. Playing Minnie's violent lover, he brings all of his acting skill to the part, most importantly a stillness. Whereas his leads take great pains to register their emotions, Cassavetes just stands there and lets you fill in the blanks. In the end, this stillness is what this film needs, a respite from emotionalism where the characters can just get to know each other. That it never arrives is a testament to how little the director and his subject matter connect with each other. For a better romance, go with Hollywood; for a better Cassavetes picture, go see A Woman Under the Influence or The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The shotgun marriage of genre and director here has created strange progeny that will confound and disappoint devotees on either side of the divide.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers While the colour quality very definitely pegs the baffling Minnie and Moskowitz as a turn-of-the-Seventies movie, Anchor Bay's 16×9-enhanced, 1.85:1 letterboxed video transfer is on a par with their releases of more recent films. The crisp shadow detail lends the image astounding depth, and black level is generally solid. Like most of Cassavetes's work, this film was shot guerilla-style, so you can blame any contrast flaws on poor available light. Grain is evident but not abundant.
The Dolby Digital mono track is more than serviceable but less than great. All that yelling sounds hollow; on the other hand, dialogue is never difficult to decipher. (Good thing, too, considering the disc's lack of subtitles and/or closed captions.) In addition to a trailer and cast and crew bios, AB has seen fit to include a feature-length commentary by stars Cassel and Rowlands that is an absolute delight. Much in the vain of his handlebar-mustached alter ego, Cassel domineers their stroll down memory lane. Cassavettes is the focus of the discussion (which sometimes sounds stitched together, though it is screen-specific, for the most part), and we receive a lot of missing pieces in the puzzle that was/is his career. On the posthumous recommendation of John C., I'm off to rent A Place in the Sun.
115 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Mono); DVD-9; Region One; Anchor Bay
