Love Streams (1984) - Cassavetes
Sarah
(Gena Rowlands) is going through a horrible divorce. Her husband
(Seymour Cassel) and their daughter don't want anything to do with her.
She is not stable enough. For her, love never stops, it's a continuous
stream. Then there is her brother Robert Harmon (John Cassavetes), a
famous writer whose life is soaked with booze and one-nighters. They
both are impulsive, nutty mess: they make rash decisions thinking as if
they are the most logical solutions which always lead them into
disasters. My favorite scenes with Harmon are the ones where hits up
with a pretty lounge singer, insists on driving her home in her car
while drunk, crashes her car and ends up chatting up with her mother,
and where he gives his 8 year old son (of whom he hasn't seen since his
birth) beer to drink and leaves him alone all night in a Vegas hotel.
Sarah is just as crazy. She thinks her brother needs something to love
in his life, something fuzzy and cuddly, so she goes to animal shelter
and brings in the whole zoo into his LA house- two miniature horses, a
hen and a dozen chicks, ducks, a goat and a dog. Harmon obviously is in
no shape himself to take care of his nutty sister, but insists that she
stays with him. But she is dead set on reuniting with her estranged
family who doesn't love her any longer.
Cassavetes's world of the
lives of mental, emotional wrecks is often funny and poignant
precisely because of the character's complete lack of self-awareness. Both Rowlands and Cassavetes are amazing in this funny and sad film.