That '70s Drift: Late Genius

Stretching the conceit to include a hangover from the '70s, late Cassavetes:

LOVE STREAMS (1984) (B+) -  This plays like John Cassavetes' greatest hits. He's got wife Gena Rowlands in full meltdown mode, he himself plays an aging playboy bent on self-destruction, and there are plenty of women (young and old) for him and his camera to flirt with.

Here Cassavetes are brother and sister. We observe their various breakdowns and idiosyncratic behavior -- he's a wealthy writer, Robert Harmon, with a big home and a harem, she, Sarah, is going through a divorce and trying to retain custody of her daughter. And about halfway through the film (fairly cumbersome at 141 minutes), they meet up. The question is, will they rescue each other, find succor in the love between them.

Cassavetes reaches back to his earliest work, like "Shadows" and "Faces," trafficking in jazz and bebop and oddball characters, like a transvestite who chats him up at a bar early in the film. Robert makes a move on a jazz singer while stumbling drunk and later slow-dances ("Killer of Sheep" style) with her mother, in a scene that references "Husbands," perhaps Cassavetes' masterpiece. Robert's ex appears on his doorstep with the 8-year-old son he's never paid attention to, and Robert baby-sits the boy by taking him to Vegas and abandoning the child while he spends the night with a woman. Because that's what guys do, so get that through your head, OK?

"Love is dead," Robert intones at one point, his voice rising in irritation. "Love is a fantasy little girls have."  His sister has a different opinion. She notes that love "is a stream" that is "continuous, it doesn't stop."

Rowlands is the star here. She is both manic and heartbreaking. She babbles to a luggage attendant somewhere in Europe trying to herd two carts piled high with bags and what is apparently the entirety of her worldly possessions. At one point, back at Robert's house she goes to an animal farm and returns home (via cab) with a small menagerie, including two ponies. Robert doesn't blink; soon he's playing Farmer Bob, tending to the flock as if it's no big deal. He apparently is grasping the emptiness of zipless sex and is finding non-romantic love in a household with his sister.

That household is Cassavetes and Rowland's own home. The rooms are dimly lit (one memorable shot shows a neon jukebox in a darkened room, silhouetting a couple dancing) and the setting claustrophobic. The milieu adds confusion and a sense of dread that helps you identify with the characters. Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel joins the epic pair in providing some gritty ad-libbing that brings a true 1970s feel to the story.

In the end, though, rather than serving as a career-capping masterpiece (Cassavetes would direct one more film that he didn't write), "Love Streams" never completely comes together as a transcendent narrative. The pieces -- echoes of earlier great films -- never cohere into a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts. 

FEDORA (1978) (B-minus) - You've got to give Billy Wilder credit. His penultimate film as a writer/director is a bald attempt to sum up his career, and it's quaint as hell.

The genius of 20th century cinema brings back William Holden to bookend his own role in "Sunset Boulevard" to reprise the story of the denouement of the golden era of Hollywood. Like in that classic film, we open with a dead body, this one an aging actress who has run into a speeding train. Here Holden carries the story of Barry "Dutch" Detweiler, a struggling indie producer, who is intent on tracking down the reclusive Fedora (Marthe Keller), a Polish star of the studio era, to get her to attach her name to his rewrite of "Anna Karenina" in order to lure investors.

After we see the death of Fedora, we flash back two weeks, when Detweiler was hunting her down in Corfu. It doesn't take long for him to starts unraveling a mystery surrounding Fedora and the tragic events that lead to her death. Who's the old lady who holds a guru-like spell over Fedora, and just what is the creepy Dr. Vando (Jose Ferrer) doing to Fedora to make her seem ageless? And what's with Fedora's obsession with Michael York, the actor she abandoned on the set of her last movie?

Wilder was making a statement about the end of that golden era and the rise of the American New Wave. In a clever meta moment, he has a camera assistant on the set of an early Fedora film point out that the "boobs" she's displaying will run afoul of censors -- a dull observation in 1978, in a movie in which those boobs, tastefully displayed, are the only ones seen in this quaint, PG-rated fare. Elsewhere, Wilder twists himself in knots name-checking as many old actors and directors he can in one screenplay.

Detweiler, as Wilder's avatar, grumps his way throughout this one. "The kids with the long hair have taken over," Dutch laments in one scene. "They don't need a script -- just give them a hand-held camera with a zoom lens." We get it, Billy. Things just ain't like they used to be.

Instead of a loving paean to the past, this plays more like a bitter lament about the hippies and the vulgar "auteurs" trashing the beauty and the legacy of the classy "pictures" he and the studio greats used to produce. It doesn't help that the script is stretched out to a plodding two hours.

Holden makes with the wisecracks, and a plot twist in the second hour is worth waiting around for (or fast-forwarding to). If only Wilder had the zip and the energy to make this one soar like his memorable old films used to.