Razor Love: Minnie and Moskowitz Revisited
In the brash, hyper emotional cinema of John Cassavetes, men and women grapple mainly with love, life, friendship, and mental illness, or what the man and his cohorts likely would have referred to at the time as “craziness.” A Woman Under the Influence witnesses a husband and wife’s tumultuously fragile, but deeply tender relationship, and how they maneuver her erratic mental state. Husbands, a portrait of three friends, roars and burps with a brutish and violating machismo. The people who populate his films constantly rhapsodize in grand monologues, spout drunken philosophies, sing drunken songs.
In an interview filmed during the making of his last independently-produced feature, Love Streams, he stated, “I have a need for the characters to really analyze love, discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other, do all the stuff in that war, in that word-polemic and film-polemic of what life is. And the rest of the stuff doesn’t really interest me. It may interest other people, but I have a one-track mind. That’s all I’m interested in — love.” The critic Dennis Lim wrote, “The film’s title is a hopeful manifesto, a wish of the heart stated as a law of physics.” For Cassavetes, love was something that streams, just like time. (I wonder how he might respond to the so-called streaming cinema of our modern day — cinema without need for a cinema, virtual cinema, made all the more prevalent by the antisocial necessity of this plague time. Cinema has always been a stream — across history, across sight and sound.)
Cassavetes’ filmography has left an indelible mark on the movies, for better or worse. Nick Cassavetes distilled his father’s obsession with love into his classic tale of Hallmark heteronormativity, The Notebook, a film that starred his mother, John’s widow and eternal muse, Gena Rowlands. More recently, director Sam Levinson attempted to ape the auteur’s defining pathos, along with the general look and feel of Cassavetes’ early black and white films, in his embarrassingly written 2020 feature, Malcolm and Marie — which looked like a perfume commercial and sounded like a student film.
The filmmaker is most often remembered for his later works such as A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Opening Night, and acting in films such as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Elaine May’s brilliant Mikey and Nicky, a heartbreakingly intimate portrait of friendship disguised as a crime thriller, opposite his friend and frequent collaborator Peter Falk. One film that tends to be under-appreciated, however, is his 1971 romantic comedy of sorts, Minnie and Moskowitz (although its title alone seems to be another likely source of inspiration for the son of Barry Levinson.)
Starring Rowlands as Minnie Moore, a museum curator, and Seymour Cassel, another frequent player in Cassavetes’ company, as Seymour Moskowitz, a parking lot attendant, (along with some members of Rowlands’ and Cassavetes’ family,) the film came after the shockingly unrestrained Husbands, and had a similarly shaggy feel. That shagginess is made literal by Cassel’s turn as Moskowitz. As Roger Ebert described his character, “He has a magnificent mustache, shoulder-length hair and very little else to show for his life so far.”
Seymour sits in a diner booth adjacent to a discomfiting, empty-eyed weirdo (Timothy Carey.) He tells the man that he just saw a film starring Humphrey Bogart, and asks him if he likes the actor. The man speaks in non-sequiturs, like a parody of a John Cassavetes character. He looks sweaty. “Everyday people, that’s what’s wrong with the world,” he mumbles. Seymour laughs out of politeness and tells the man his name. “Moskowitz, that’s Welsh,” the man replies, continuing, “You don’t know what Welsh is — that’s Wales. Good people. Real good people. They’re quiet, though. They’re sullen. They cry, they laugh, they sing, they know! I know.” He’s now shouting. Seymour starts to shift in his seat, looking around. “What do you know?” He asks, up for the challenge of figuring this guy out. “I know it’s hard to shave at night without soap, I know it’s hard to breathe at night without air,” the man replies, as if telling a riddle. Seymour offers to tell the man a joke. The man bangs his table, flipping a glass of water at him. “I don’t want to hear no jokes.” Moskowitz throws up in utensils in response, bellowing, “Don’t listen to no jokes! But don’t be a joke with me!” After this suddenly tense exchange, the two go on as if nothing had just happened. When the man begins to recite a poem, Seymour tries to pay the guy’s bill and leaves the diner.
He goes to a bar, deciding it’s his turn to make strangers uncomfortable. He sips from people’s drinks. He goes right up to a woman and insists that she knows who he is. A black man shoves Seymour away. Seymour puts his fists up. “Come on, Muhammad!” This racist retort gets him chased out. He immediately pulls the same stunts somewhere else, inspiring similar aggression. For a third and final time, he ends up at another bar. He talks to anyone who might listen and flirts with a red haired woman, affecting an Irish brogue. Once more, disapproving men close in on him, grabbing hold of him as he squirms to break from their grip. They land a few blows on him once they’re outside.
Seymour visits his mother and tells her he’s going to California. And so he goes to California, where one Minnie Moore has just gone to the movies with her friend Florence, to see a picture starring Humphrey Bogart. “You know those black and white movies? They give me a headache,” Florence says with a laugh.
My mind flashes to Cassavetes’ monochromatic Faces, one of the first notable works of independent American cinema. The cinematography of Faces is attuned to, well, exactly what you’d think. I imagine that for Cassavetes, this picture was what sparked a career-long preoccupation with the specific features of Cassel and Rowlands — although love itself had much more to do with his fascination for the former. And what a face she has. Gleaned in close-up through the sediment of 16mm, Rowlands radiates an empyrean glow. With its dour demeanor and invasive framing, however, Faces is certainly the kind of black and white movie that could give someone a headache.
“You know I think that movies are a conspiracy?” Minnie says after a sip of wine. “I mean it. They are actually a conspiracy. Because they set you up, Florence. They set you up from the time you’re a little kid. They set you up to believe in everything. They set you up to believe in, uh, in ideals, and strength, and good guys, and romance, and of course, love.” She tells Florence that the Clark Gables and Humphrey Bogarts of the movies don’t exist in the real world. “You go to the movies — ,” the film cuts away from Minnie, mid-sentence, interrupting her with a honk from a taxi cab. Minnie sets down the stairs to the street, drunkenly stumbling most of her way down. She gets home and lights a cigarette, singing to herself. John’s home. Or not John, but Jim. A man with a wife and kids somewhere else. He slaps Minnie around.
Almost every man Minnie interacts with in the film either yells at her or manhandles her. When Minnie goes on a blind date with a guy named Zelmo, he quickly unravels, unsure of how to act around her. He makes assumptions about her life and personality. He shouts about his body hair. He talks in the same strange way Timothy Carey’s stranger does — and in the same way Seymour does — without common courtesy or an awareness of the volume of his voice. When Minnie tells Zelmo that she’s really not interested in him and would just like to have lunch, he explodes. It’s hilarious, until he chases after her into the parking lot, and then things turn frightening. Zelmo snaps at the valet to bring his Chevy around — and it’s none other than Seymour Moskowitz. Why did Seymour decide to leave New York and fly to LA just to work the same shitty job somewhere else? Who knows? Seymour is a freewheeling guy. Maybe he wanted more sunshine. Zelmo storms off into his Chevy, only to turn right around back into the parking lot and call Minnie a whore. Hearing this, Seymour tackles Zelmo, leaping off the hood of a car and punching him in the face. He pulls Minnie into his truck and they speed away to safety. It’s quite the meet-cute. Seymour takes Minnie to get something to eat, but she’s exhausted and shaken up by the whole ordeal. She gets up and leaves, and just like Zelmo, Seymour explodes. He grabs her by the arm. “I’m just about to burst into tears, I’m not kidding. I’m sorry,” Minnie says, and walks away. Cut to: Seymour chasing her down in his truck, nearly running her over. He forces Minnie to get in, but drops her back off at the museum at her insistence.
Over the course of the next hour or so, we are expected to believe that Minnie (albeit reluctantly) falls in love with this man. If a romantic comedy played out like this in today’s time, it would certainly cause something of an outrage. Here are a few of the comments on the Youtube page where the film is posted:
“Gena Rowlands getting yelled at by angry abusive men. Oddly entertaining regardless.”
“These characters are pointlessly erratic and so over the top that they’re almost unbelievable. (He drove on the sidewalk to yank her into his truck AFTER he just ‘saved’ her from Zelmo.) This brilliant style of directing gets lost in a loose script that leans heavy on abuse and stalking.”
“Great movie. The poor girl sure gets a lot of abuse from men. I guess that’s how it was back then. Very brutal treatment of women.”
“This woman gets tossed and ordered around by a bunch of juvenile men and often ends up taking responsibility for their inadequacies. It really shows an angle of a toxic culture that shaped this woman to be the play thing of men.”
Seymour’s dramatic stunt with his truck calls to mind a relatively recent film by another auteur, Vincent Gallo, whose repulsive misogyny is, shall we say, less debatable. In his 1998 film Buffalo ‘66, which happened to star Cassavetes mainstay Ben Gazzara, Gallo cast himself in the lead role as a man who essentially kidnaps Christina Ricci and forces her to pretend to be his girlfriend. Gallo’s film is also referred to — perhaps for lack of a better phrase — as a romantic comedy. I suppose it could be argued that by choosing to depict the men of Minnie and Moskowitz as emotionally stunted brutes, Cassavetes was attempting at the time to invert what people had come to expect from the genre. Like Minnie says, she’s never met Humphrey Bogart. By the film’s end, however, she has been slapped, grabbed, choked, and harassed by men purportedly seeking romance. So what exactly does this film signal in regards to Cassavetes’ idea of love? It’s a complicated question. I’m not looking to “cancel” the filmmaker, a man who has been dead for thirty-two years, nor am I someone who believes that depiction equals endorsement. But it sure can be a hard film to watch, at least for the film’s first half.
As Seymour and Minnie get to know each other, however, a strange spark ignites. Later on, he comes to visit her at home. She slams the door on him, but he pushes it open and comes in anyway. They get gradually closer, Minnie’s voice breathier. She kisses him softly on the head. “What can this poor guy want with someone like me?” “Everything,” Seymour insists, and picks her up in his arms. They go on dates — to the movies, of course, and to the ice cream parlor. At one point, Seymour hysterically professes his adoration for her by exclaiming, “I think about you so much I forget to go to the bathroom!” A few minutes later, he does a handstand for her. I mean, who could resist?
The couple still manages to find themselves in trouble, though, as Seymour ends up in another fistfight that manages to inflict some collateral damage on Minnie. She bleeds a bit — nothing too serious — but Seymour is beside himself. “There’s some kind of craziness going on here that’s not right,” Minnie admits, after cleaning herself up in her bathroom. “Every time you come near me, you get beaten up, every time I get near you, I get cut or punched or something.” She starts to sob. “It’s a pretend place that people get to, and they never say it, but it just doesn’t exist.” She’s been set up again.
Seymour won’t stand for this. He knows love is real. He can feel it. It’s right there. He insists she does love him, but she refuses. Seymour’s helpless. He threatens to kill himself and grabs a pair of scissors, and without realizing it, snips off part of that big, bushy mustache. When it hits him, he chuckles and begins to cut the whole thing off. Minnie looks on in shock, tears stuck to her face. Seymour roars and goes to cut his ponytail. Minnie shrieks, and halts her hippie Samson’s self-sacrifice. She kisses him. By the time Minnie and Moskowitz reaches its close, the film’s viewers will probably feel exhausted. But there’s also a real feeling of catharsis to be found in its resolution. With the snip of some scissors, a man miraculously begins anew. From that moment on, love streams.
