Product: Faces [VHS] (1968)
Rating: 3.0
Important, but grating.
Faces (John Cassavettes, 1968)I have to rank myself among those, having seen Faces, who understand its importance in the film world, but can't bring themselves to like the movie. I understand why Cassavettes did the things he did with this movie, why the film is supersaturated and the sound mix is awful and all the other little quirks that kept this so far away from Hollywood, and its subject matter is conceptually brilliant; the question one has to put to oneself is whether you're actually going to be able to sit through two hours plus of what is, essentially, boring and obnoxious cocktail-party banter, even after the cocktail party itself is long over.The main characters in Faces are a married couple, Richard and Maria Forst (John Marley and Lynn Carlin), who have found their marriage going stale, and in response, each flirts with the idea of finding a younger lover. The results of their dalliances, however, are anything but the pleasant no-strings-attached sex each was hoping for; in fact, the consequences are potentially disastrous.It's a great idea, and I do like the way it's carried off, most of the time. Technically, it's a brilliant approach to the subject; Cassavettes gives us washed-out characters in a washed-out film, bending every aspect of the moviemaking process to the psyches of the people he's got in front of the camera. And the script works right along with that premise; if you have washed-out characters in a washed-out film, what other sort of dialogue should they have saved washed out? Unfortunately, however, this has always been my problem with 'The Dead", that short story of James Joyce's that everyone but me seems to love. My take on it is that Joyce was subscribing to the hypothesis "if you want to write a story about boring people, write a boring story". And the story certainly succeeds beyond any reasonable bounds in that regard, which I assume is why so many people like it. Similarly Faces; Cassavettes has done a fantastic job of it here, though substituting "washed-out" (I can't imagine anyone calling these folks "boring"). And it's a deft and proficient depiction of the characters. It's the characters themselves that get on my nerves. ***