✯✯✯✯
To me, John Cassavetes is a director who likes to focus on the frailty of women, and how much support some women need from men. Some people may consider that misogyny, and maybe it is to some extent. Films like this and A Woman Under the Influence have weak, mentally unstable female protagonists, and I believe that Cassavetes tried to redeem himself with his beautiful final film, Love Streams. Now, I may be wrong for all I know, but that's just how I see it. Opening Night isn't my absolute favorite Cassavetes film, but it still is a great effort from this very under-seen director.
I love how the film presents its story as a stage play, much like the characters are in a play themselves. A lot of the time, we see Gena Rowlands and Cassavetes rehearsing scenes for the same play, and each practice gets progressively more strenuous on Myrtle Gordon (Rowlands). She has just witnessed one of her biggest fans die in a car accident, and it certainly seems to take quite the toll on her mental health. She can't get herself up, she can't take the filtered slaps that Cassavetes is supposed to give her in the play performance, and she can't seem to communicate her feelings to the people around her very well. She drowns out her agony in massive amounts of alcohol, yet the people around her all seem supportive, trying to get her out of the hole she has pushed herself into.
Ben Gazzara gives an outstanding performance as the stage play's director, and he doesn't seem the least bit concerned about his lead actress's overall well-being. He glosses over her drunken stupors, and insists that the show must go on. He does his best to support her, but even the strongest man can only help so much. Sometimes, when a man is brought to his wit's end trying to help someone as much as humanly possible, he just has to let go and trust that she can hold her own. The characters around Myrtle should be completely furious with her drunken habits and behaviors, yet they seem as supportive as possible. No matter how badly Myrtle is deteriorating their own lives, they continue to show their own love and support, and those type of people make the best friends.
Opening Night could have benefited from being quite a bit shorter. A lot of the dialogue felt too stretched out, and some of the scenes just felt like filler to bring the audience to the next part of the film. Some of the scenes just dragged on to me, and the film can get boring during a few repetitive rehearsal scenes. However, when Cassavetes focuses his film on its fracture female protagonist, that is when its best bits shine their brightest. Gena Rowlands gives a great performance, although I still prefer her in A Woman Under the Influence. Cassavetes continues a theme prevalent through his earlier films that focuses on fracture female psyches, yet this film somehow didn't capture that quite as well as AWUtI did. Overall, it is a decently great effort on Cassavetes' part, and I still really enjoyed it. Had there been a shorter cut, it may have been even better than it already was, and may have found itself free of certain scenes that drag the film out more than they should. It's a fantastic story that wasn't quite brought to its fullest potential.