In tribute to Gena Rowlands, Unhook the Stars was one of my favorite films of hers, and it’s not as well-known as her films that she did with her late husband John Cassavetes. I really liked Minnie & Moskowitz, Opening Night, and Gloria, but I also really liked her later work, like her segment with Winona Ryder in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth in 1991, and her role as Uma Thurman’s mother in the Mira Nair-directed HBO film Hysterical Blindness in 2002, and her onscreen pairings with Ben Gazzara in the Cassavetes films, in Hysterical Blindness, and in their segment in 2006’s Paris Je T’aime titled Quartier Latin, which she also wrote.
Unhook the Stars came out in 1996, and was directed by her son Nick Cassavetes, who also directed her in The Notebook, which younger audiences likely know of her better as the elderly version of Allie. In this movie, she’s a widow living alone who has fractured relationships with her adult children, and she’s lonely. A single mom (Marisa Tomei) and her son (a pre-Star Wars Jake Lloyd) move in next door, and the mom is going through a messy separation with her son’s father, and is trying to support them alone. She asks the widow to baby-sit him once, and the widow volunteers to do it regularly, because she likes feeling needed and taking care of the boy.
The two women become friends, and in the scene below, they go out to a local bar, to have a night out, and the mom is just ranting about her ex and full of chatter, while the widow, who has seen life, just takes it in quietly, reacting without speaking in the bathroom, and gives her simple advice. I just really liked their chemistry in playing friends, and I really enjoyed this movie a lot. Rowlands was a fantastic actress, who felt like she was living her characters rather than just acting, and I’m glad she’s being remembered and honored.
Also, she looked like my grandma, who had blonde hair, was a New York City native, and had a quiet glamour to her, so it’s like I see my grandma when I see Gena Rowlands.
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