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10 Essential Gena Rowlands Performances
The New Hollywood icon can always be counted on to bare her soul.
The first of Rowlands and Cassavetes’s major collaborations together, Faces is a disheveled piece of indie cinema that introduced the themes that would define the rest of the couple’s work together: love, marriage, alcohol, and the politics between men and women. While practically every man she encounters in the film — including her shithead boyfriend, Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel) —berates her, manhandles her, and physically assaults her to varying degrees, Rowlands carries herself with rhapsodic grace, staring coolly beneath her octagonal Linda Farrows — until she can no longer maintain that composure. She takes herself on a solo bowling date, brings home a menagerie of farm animals, visits a joke shop, and tries desperately — and unsuccessfully — to make her ex-husband and daughter laugh with a clown nose, chattering teeth, and googly eyes.
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