Cirrhosis From The Crypt

 "You never know how much of the journey you will travel alone."-- Marthe Keller as Anushka

“Yes,” it was noted while watching “A Woman Under The Influence,”  the corresponding lack of judgement embedded in Cassavetes’s directorial captures is to some degree echoed by John McNaughton in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which was released for distribution scarcely sixteen years after this very seventies expose about a blue collar family under duress, essentially excavated for the sympathetic viewer, and only one year after Rowlands buried her iconoclastic other half, curiously enough. There is a correspondence in the focus of the camera between how Rowlands unravels for her directorial partner, and how McNaughton focuses on Michael Rooker as a feral, predatory apex male who makes torture an aesthetic dialogue, although the actual Henry Lee Lucas wasn’t so grandiose or magnetic;  the authentic convict, one suspects, was a dungaree rugged bullshit artist. There is another biopic about Lucas entitled Drifter, a rare catch on an adjunct channel called Through The Decades, more traditional in its approach than McNaughton’s effort to offer us up a seminal perspective, where the actor portraying Lucas was more or less a grease monkey giving the Rangers who apprehended him a run for the taxpayer’s money, and this Henry is perhaps more accurately drawn than Rooker’s.  Less art for the sake of more factual realism,  but Michael Rooker’s Henry functions more like a draught horse sadist, offering up just as much conversation with Otis and Becky as necessary.  The salaried critical class is also correct in its consensus that McNaughton’s overall exposure of bottom barrel sordidness is uneven. At times he offers up a compelling look at torture as expressionistic, then veering into the camp of a typical horror film. The death of Otis almost knocks the viewer off script, as such.  Cassavetes is more disciplined with his composite of Mabel in 1974, and although both films are treating different subject matter, the lead characters are similarly alienated, lousy in their judgement calls, and the world built upon their templates is a liberal world in paralysis. I am also much less sympathetic to Rowlands in her interpretation of Mabel than the Widescreenings examination which focuses on “Influence” within its generational mode, as it should be. We need appreciation of signature independence, but let’s cut to the chase: Rowlands, in spite of her Welsh background, is playing a Jewish princess against Falk, in his ethnic convolutions to sustain his premiere status, as the hyperbolic husband, and furls around in slightly too kittenish fashion, in a type of prelude to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Cassavetes certainly has trace elements of anticipation for the much more powerful Nicholson movie, but he abstracts and collapses Mabel’s sufferance because his story is about the family and community in a concentric circle around that emotional pain. What do we expect of this dramaturgy, when all is said and done?

I have always treated Cassavetes with the same degree of reverential shellac which is comparable to what Ingmar Bergman receives from Sweden, but the old man who gets his insatiable repressions burst by Amy Irving in The Fury is little different than the parodied cripple in Rosemary's Baby of yesteryear. Wry and florid bemusement has little place in the endemic civilization the Carter administration left behind, even when there's nothing we can do.