Love Streams
John Cassavetes (1984)
For the second time running, a John Cassavetes film at BFI left me baffled until I read about it afterwards. In the case of Gloria, I hadn’t understood why Cassavetes made the movie at all. With Love Streams, I struggled to make sense of what the film meant to say.
Cassavetes didn’t intend to direct Gloria and he didn’t mean to star in Love Streams. The role of Robert Harmon, an aging, alcoholic roué and writer, should have been played by Jon Voight, who dropped out two weeks before shooting was due to begin. Cassavetes replaced Voight because he wasn’t prepared – or in any fit state – to delay making the picture. As a result of his own alcoholism, he had recently been given only six months to live. In the event, he survived another five years and to direct another movie, Big Trouble (1986). As with Gloria, though, that was unplanned: Cassavetes took over the reins from the screenwriter Andrew Bergman and no one seems to have been happy with the result. In most people’s eyes, probably including his own, Love Streams was the last real Cassavetes film.
As Robert, Cassavetes looks ill and old but he’s is the best reason for seeing Love Streams. He’s so completely inside the character it seems incredible he inherited the part at such short notice. His naturalistic acting is superb: talk about practising what you preach. The first hour of the film alternates between scenes featuring, on the one hand, Robert and, on the other, a middle-aged woman called Sarah Lawson, played by Gena Rowlands. Although the two stories are told in parallel for some time, any viewer aware that Rowlands and Cassavetes go back a long way, both as a screen and as a real-life partnership, will be liable to assume that an important connection between their two characters is to be revealed.
Robert is introduced briefly, yelled at by a woman who brands him a coward and ‘disgusting’ and who’s never seen again. Next, his house is teeming with much younger women, whom he plies with drinks and questions (‘What do you sell?’, ‘Tell me what a good time is’). He informs one of these girls that ‘a beautiful woman has to offer a man her secrets’. (He comes out with a similar line later on.) Portable tape-recorder at the ready, he appears to be researching his next book. He’s then in a club, supposedly for the same reason. The clientele seems to be predominantly gay and transvestite men but Robert is drawn to Susan (Diahnne Abbott), the singer on the club stage. Afterwards, they have a drink together. He’s soon blotto, falls down the steps at Susan’s home, and ends up spending the night there, attended to by her mother (Margaret Abbott).
When Sarah divorces her husband Jack (Seymour Cassel), she gets custody of their pre-adolescent daughter Debbie (Risa Martha Blewitt) but not for long. As a result of her mother’s mental health issues – at any rate, her eccentric and exhausting personality – Debbie decides to live with her father instead. Sarah goes on a trip to Europe before returning to America and arriving unexpectedly at Robert’s Los Angeles home. The relationship between them isn’t explained immediately. His promiscuity might lead you to assume she’s an old flame. In fact, they’re brother and sister.
On the same day that Sarah re-enters his life, Robert is contacted by a woman called Agnes (Michele Conway) with whom he once had a child. She needs him to take care of their eight-year-old son Albie (Jakob Shaw) for twenty-four hours. Robert drives the boy to Las Vegas, leaving him in a hotel room while he goes out for the evening. When he gets back, Albie, frightened and distressed, begs his father to take him home to his mother, which Robert does. By now, it’s becoming harder to enjoy Cassavetes the actor because Robert is emerging as troublingly objectionable and Cassavetes the director’s view of him as indulgent. Taking leave of the women he’s been with before returning to Albie in the Vegas hotel room, Robert tells them, ’Love is everything. Love is everything. Just remember that’. When he gets Albie back to Agnes, the boy’s stepfather, seeing how upset the child is, floors Robert with a punch. This upsets Albie even more: he weeps as he tells Robert repeatedly, ‘I love you, Dad’. In his admiring Criterion Collection piece on the film, Dennis Lim quotes Cassavetes as follows: ‘I have a one-track mind … all I’m interested in, is love’.
Sarah too is obsessed with love. In a session with a psychiatrist (David Rowlands), she insists that, ‘Love is a stream. It’s continuous’. (The psychiatrist disagrees.) Later, she asks her ex-husband if he too believes this. (Jack replies, with reasonable exasperation, ‘we have a little daughter going through puberty right now. And she’s more important than you are right now’.) Sarah seems meant to be abundantly and impulsively loving – so much so she’s impossible to live with. (Gena Rowlands conveys this very well, and sometimes touchingly.) Late on in the film, she goes to an animal shelter with a view to getting Robert a pet to look after: Sarah thinks it would be good for him. When she sees what’s on offer, she changes her mind. She’s about to leave empty-handed when the woman at the shelter[1] encourages her to make friends with an intimidating, emphatically well-hung dog called Jim. Sarah arrives back at Robert’s with a whole menagerie in tow – a goat, a duck, a parrot and miniature horses. Jim is delivered to the house separately, by his rueful minder (Leonard P Geer).
The procession of mainly non-domestic animals through Robert’s house has a surreal quality – an indication of how Love Streams has slipped its realistic moorings. The editing (by George C Villaseñor) develops an increasingly fractured rhythm. There’s discontinuity in the appearance of some characters (Jack, for example). There are dream and fantasy sequences. These range from Robert’s briefly seeing alpha-male dog Jim metamorphose into a handsome, unclothed young man (Neil Bell), which is funny; to quite extended episodes with Sarah and Debbie at their centre, which are protracted. At 140 minutes, the film as a whole is excessively long and, by this stage, feels it.
It’s easy to sympathise with Cassavetes’s compulsion, in the shadow of terminal illness, to translate into cinema his professed preoccupation with love. It’s hard, at this distance in time, to take a kind view of quite a lot of what he puts on the screen. This applies most obviously to how Robert uses women sexually and ill treats his young son both emotionally and physically. It also applies to the treatment of the creatures Sarah brings home. I didn’t sit through the entire closing credits; perhaps they included the nowadays standard assurance that no animals were harmed etc. But the goat, dragged along unwillingly, definitely didn’t have a good time on the set of Love Streams.
When Sarah returns with the mini-Noah’s Ark, it echoes her earlier arrival at Robert’s house after her European excursion, with two taxis full of suitcases – which may or may not symbolise ‘baggage’. Robert’s walls are plastered with photographs. They could include family photographs but just about the only family reminiscence that comes from him or Sarah is her recalling their father used to say, ‘For every problem, there is an answer’. The screenplay was written by Cassavetes with Ted Allan, whose play My Sister’s Keeper was the inspiration for Love Streams. According to an extract from Tom Charity’s John Cassavetes: Lifeworks, which BFI used (as for Gloria) as a programme note, Cassavetes ‘cut out both the incest which occurred between [the brother and sister] and all the psychological backstory Allan had crafted’. Charity quotes Allan as saying that the result gave ‘the curious impression that Robert and Sarah were inflicting the same thing on their own children that they had suffered’.
This was no doubt true for Allan but the experience of Love Streams is very different for someone coming to it fresh. As well as recasting My Sister’s Keeper, Allan, says Tom Charity, also wrote ‘a companion piece … which shows how these same characters were indelibly shaped by their father’s childhood abuse’. Charity notes that Cassavetes also hoped to film this companion piece (perhaps with his and Gena Rowlands’s son and one of their daughters in the main roles). It’s understandable how, in the circumstances of his ill health, that plan never came to fruition. Viewers unaware of the full context of Ted Allan’s material are unlikely to see Robert’s and Sarah’s behaviour as explained by what happened to them as children. Since Cassavetes eschews character study in favour of characters avowing or aphorising about love, we’re more likely to infer from his film the message that love, though it may lead to mess and pain, is transcendent – and renders unimportant its means of expression and its consequences. This is hard to swallow, not least because it begs the question of what Cassavetes is taking the magic word to mean. One thing is clear enough, though: his essential swansong was a labour of love.
12 November 2019
[1] I can’t track down this character in the cast list or therefore the actress’s name.