It's only by John Cassavetes’ amazing standards that a film
as prickly as
Minnie and Moskowitz could feel relatively conventional. It
fits recognizably within the romantic comedy genre: two emotionally unsettled
people meet under offbeat circumstances (he’s a parking lot attendant at the
restaurant where she’s fleeing from a terrible failed date) and rapidly enter a
relationship defined as much by conflict and anger as by recognizable
connection. Before they meet, they’re both seen separately attending an old
Bogart movie, and Minnie (Gena Rowlands) explicitly cites the gulf between silver
screen illusions and turgid realities: the movie often seems to be frantically
underlining the point, as Minnie’s former lover (played by Cassavetes himself)
slaps her several times across the face, and the man she meets on that bad
first date blurts out information about a mistake he made on his wedding night,
and about his unnaturally hairless legs. Of course, such emotional rawness and
behavioral extremity, the sense of people hoping to discover themselves by throwing
stuff out there and seeing what sticks, is typical of Cassavetes, but in this particular
case (and I emphasize again, this is relatively speaking) the effects seem a
bit more studied and less deeply felt, the eventual route to each other somewhat
arbitrary. But then, that’s probably part of the point, given how the film ultimately
places coupledom as a form of suppression – as soon as they decide to get
married, they call their respective mothers, and then sit mostly quietly
through an excruciating dinner in which Seymour’s mother lays out all his
faults, and then through a wedding ceremony in which the priest forgets Minnie’s
name (with Cassavetes allowing himself, for once, an easy laugh). The final
scene is of a teeming, happily chaotic family get-together, but who knows how much of the real Minnie and Seymour remain intact within it?
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