An Anodyne to Loneliness

By JAY COCKS

In any film by John Cassavetes, the acting is all. The emotional force and conviction of his performers shape and generate the story. Where most film makers require their actors to conform to the demands of the camera. Cassavetes allows his actors considerable freedom to improvise; the camera is always at their service. This technique gives his films a slightly fractured appearance, but it achieves a unique degree of reality. No American film maker deals so lavishly or so lovingly with people in their every aspect.

Cassavetes' earlier Faces and Husbands dealt with the terrible toll exacted by emotional commitment. Minnie and Moskowitz deals with the positive, sometimes desperate need for that same commitment. Its theme, familiar but here recharged with emotion, is the search of two people for an anodyne to loneliness. Created in a mood of sustained ebullience, it is his lightest, most accessible film, and one of the few movies in recent times that could be called joyous.

The text might have been taken from Eleanor Rigby: "All the lonely people, where do they all come from?/ All the lonely people, where do they all belong?" Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel) is a manic parking-lot attendant who tries to meet girls by the unconvincing and always unsuccessful expedient of claiming prior acquaintance. Consequently, he spends a lot of time alone at the movies.

Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands) works in the Los Angeles County Art Museum and is involved in a dead-end affair with a married man. She spends a lot of time at the movies too, doting on the soft-focus images of her dreams. "Florence," she tipsily confides to a friend late one night, "I never had a Charles Boyer in my life." Instead, she gets Seymour Moskowitz, who pursues her with the fierce dedication of a sans-culotte storming the Bastille. His final victory makes for one of the rarest screen events: a believable and totally appropriate happy ending.

Gena Rowlands (Mrs. Cassavetes) brings a poignancy and complexity to Minnie that makes hers one of the memorable performances of the year. Cassel is full of dizzying charm and whirling-dervish energy. As always with Cassavetes' films, there are cameo roles so rich they could each make a movie in themselves: Val Avery as a loudmouthed date of Minnie's, Tim Carey as a poetry-spouting bum who disdains the movies ("A lot of lonely people sitting there looking up at a screen--what do I need that for?"). But almost stealing the show from these pros is Newcomer Katherine Cassavetes (the director's mother, and only one of a large number of his friends and relatives in the cast), whose deadly and hilarious portrayal of Seymour's mother might give Mrs. Portnoy pause.

Although Minnie and Moskowitz is Cassavetes' most carefully contained and controlled movie, the momentum sometimes lags. The cinematography is too often cursory, and there are too many scenes staged in parking lots, on staircases, or in bathrooms. Cassavetes remains oblivious to such things. It is his major fault and his greatest virtue: he cares more for his characters than for his audience.

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