OVP: Gloria (1980)

Film: Gloria (1980)
Stars: Gena Rowlands, Julie Carmen, Buck Henry, John Adames
Director: John Cassavetes
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Actress-Gena Rowlands)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I don't get to "confess" to unforgivable sins very often anymore when it comes to my film-watching.  I have made a point in the last 3-4 years of not necessarily keeping pace with the grueling tasks I set before me when it comes to watching movies (I'm a perfectionist who is always redefining "perfect" so I can never quite reach it), but I have definitely made great leaps in terms of what films I've seen.  That being said, occasionally you're reminded that there are a lot of movies, and today I will admit-I've never seen a John Cassavetes-directed film.  While I've certainly seen him act in movies (The Dirty Dozen, Rosemary's Baby), I've never seen one of his iconic, realistic pictures.  And so he feels like a good place to start for a new week, and one devoted to the Oscar Best Actress category (every weekday afternoon, we'll have a Best Actress nominee that I saw for the first time recently), as few directors have been so devoted to one particular Best Actress their whole careers.  Gena Rowlands starred in ten of Cassavetes' films, winning Oscar nominations for two of them, the second of those nominations coming for Gloria.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie Gloria reads pretty conventionally with the plot, but as you'll see below doesn't feel conventional while you're watching it.  But let's ground ourselves at least with some cursory details, shall we?  The movie takes place in the South Bronx, where an accountant and his family have had a hit put on them by the mob, as the accountant has turned state's evidence against them.  Before the mob can kill the family, the accountant gives his son Phil (Adames) to Gloria (Rowlands), a next door neighbor, to look after.  When the entire family is killed, Gloria is forced to take care of the kid despite her not having any maternal instincts, and Phil not really appreciating Gloria or what she is sacrificing.  As the movie continues, we come to learn that Gloria has a lot of connections to the mob as a former girlfriend to a mobster, and as a result knows the world well.  She starts rampaging around the city like Rambo torn between giving up the child and taking care of it.  As this is a movie, you can guess which one she picks.

Gloria in that plot description sounds kind of badass, and at times it is.  Watching a 50-year-old Rowlands, who does not resemble the action heroes we normally associate with action-adventures (athletic women like Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton), take on such a role is a treat, and I loved some of the character touches particularly the costume designers brought to this role (this is a woman who has a ton of vanity about her appearance, and it shows in the meticulous nature of her outfits).  However, Gloria is a weird movie, and I've double-checked with a film fan more familiar with Cassavetes, and it's an atypical one for the director.  The film reads like a comedy, or a spoof-the dialogue is stilted, repetitive, and Rowlands is tasked with making this gritty character feel almost like a parody.  Roger Ebert called the film "silly" multiple times in his review when the movie came out, and he's very correct-this is a silly movie, one that plays its increasingly implausible plot as if it's filled with naturalism, thus making it curious & certainly watchable, but also difficult to judge and just odd.  This makes it also hard to grade Rowlands' performance, but while it's interesting, I left unimpressed.  She doesn't have a movie where it's easy to ground her character, and her Gloria doesn't know how to match the tone of an unusual film.  It's not bad (she's Gena Rowlands, after all), but it's also an unusual performance to site, and probably was noted because it was atypical.

It is much easier to judge the performance of her costar.  It feels mean to bag on a kid, but I know I'm not the first here-Adames gives (and I'm not giving hyperbolic here) one of the worst performances I've ever seen in a film released by a major American studio.  His dialogue is so stilted-there are scenes where he delays so much in his line readings it feels like Cassavetes ran the print because he couldn't get a better take from him, and there's no sense of understanding in the performance at all.  I've read that Rick Schroder was once considered for this part, but they wanted to go with a new performer to get a more natural performance...this was the wrong instinct.  Adames won the Razzy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1980, tying Laurence Olivier of all people, and it pains me to say this was a dishonor this performance deserved.