Early in John Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moskowitz, Gena Rowlands’ character, Minnie Moore, complains to her co-worker that “movies set you up.” The 2 friends have just attended an old Bogart film earlier that evening. Minnie says she has no Humphrey Bogart, Charles Boyer or Clark Gable in her life and movies basically lie to us. Minnie thinks movies romanticize and mislead people. What she's referring to is the glamour and mythology of American cinema. She feels the American movies she grew up with (and undoubtedly loves nonetheless) have nothing to do with real life. They neglect to illuminate anything immediately recognizable about being alive. Minnie Moore is also talking about cinema as a form of propaganda.
In the first 10 minutes of Cassavetes’ wonderful 1971 film, Minnie and Moskowitz, the maverick director's usual contempt for narrative convention is on full display. For 1 hour and 50 minutes J.C. takes a sledgehammer to any and all hints at something you may've seen before (in modern movies). John Cassavetes' films (as writer/director) exhibit an open disdain for easy explanations, glaring manipulations, clever plot devices and predictable dialogue. His characters speak from the gut and the gutted heart. They repress, erupt and repeat. They are a marvelous stream of good intentions juggling words and ideas and stumbling over their own existential shoelaces.
Minnie and Moskowitz is the most romantic anti-romance movie you'll ever see. The ultimate date movie for those who'd rather not date populated with people crazy and desperate to live. Virtually every character is hardly operative at the edge of their wits. Whether it’s the boorish, overbearing Morgan Morgan (Tim Carey in an unforgettable and brilliant scene that provides a robust Beethoven-like overture to Cassavetes' film) or Zelmo Swift (a terrific and memorably loud Val Avery) sabotaging a lunch date with Minnie- or our 2 lead characters' meddlesome moms (played by Rowlands and Cassavetes own mothers, Lady Rowlands as Minnie's, Katharine Cassavetes as Moskowitz's ). These characters are so adrenalized on some cosmic cocktail of inescapable confusion and miscalculated desire- they're ticking time bombs.
The plot's easy to follow in spite of Cassavetes uniform hatred of anything straightforward. Minnie Moore is a museum curator living in L.A. She has a dull existence with no romantic prospects aside from a married man who happens to beat her on occasion (Cassavetes- charming, worthless, the imminently watchable rascal). After a miserable lunch date with Zelmo (Avery)- Minnie meets Seymour Moskowitz (Cassavetes regular, Seymour Cassel). Moskowitz wildly pursues Minnie until she finally relents and marries him.
This narrative is merely a high-wire for Cassavetes' performers to teeter and prance on. The actual events in the story play out like glimpses of a documentary about love with uncomfortable, unusual and mysterious intimacies revealed. Not that we regularly experience the acts taking place in the movie (some of them are definitely sociopathic)- but we experience the underlying tension and discomfort of the action transpiring in the film. Cassavetes is and always has been interested in people. Characters in every sense of the word. And people are messy in ways his (Cassavetes') films see quite clearly. As you watch Minnie and Moskowitz you sense the uncompromised sincerity flooding from the filmmaker and performers.
Seymour Cassel (as the excitable Seymour Moskowitz) has one of his best roles here and is very much like Cassavetes' loyal dog- running to get a tossed stick and eagerly bringing it back every time (this is not to denigrate Cassel in any way- he's marvelous in the movie). The supporting characters are all a joy to watch- leaping in and out of the film like psychotic ballerinas- each one providing their own unique brand of anguish and humility.
And then there's Rowlands. I’ve often said no filmmaker has been blessed with a greater muse. Scorsese had De Niro, John Ford had John Wayne, Jean Luc-Godard had Anna Karina- but Cassavetes got Rowlands. Gena Rowlands, one of the finest cinema performers this country's ever produced, is the warm little yearning center the rest of the film anxiously crowds around. She hides behind those oversized black sunglasses carrying her blonde curls like a little girl shirking the responsibilities of a totally disappointing adult world. Minnie aches for untainted romance while suffering the burden of her unavoidable boredom with most of humanity.
The movie was bankrolled (made for less than a million) by Universal in 1971. It has since become a cult classic and necessary viewing for fans of the Cassavetes school of filmmaking. Considered by many to be the father of "Independent" cinema, his movies are sometimes an acquired taste testing many audiences. For the others (including this writer) he's a kind of passionately pesky genius that eschews the ordinary for the extra-ordinary. He's a shepherd of the idiosyncratic.
Example- there is a moment in Minnie and Moskowitz when Seymour and Minnie are driving around in Moskowitz's beat-up truck listening to Johann Strauss's The Blue Danube. Different red and blue lights dance around the windows of the truck as it drives through the city of Los Angeles. It's a beautiful sequence. The Strauss waltz and the visuals suggest a commentary on Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic 2001- A Space Odyssey. Cassavetes seems to be saying (he more than likely saw Kubrick's great film) that a director needn't go to outer space for profundity- one needn't have a large budget to make grand, sweeping statements about humanity- you can simply put 2 love-sick, discordant characters in a barely functional automobile with classical music on the radio- and present unrestrained, breezy insight into the difficulties of life on this planet.