Cassavetes’s tenth feature, GLORIA is a Venice Golden Lion winner, an honor shared with Louis Malle’s THE ATLANTIC CITY (1980), its skeletal storyline anachronistically reminds of late comers such as Luc Besson’s LÉON: THE PROFESSIONAL and Eric Zonca’s JULIA, Gena Rowlands plays an ex-moll Gloria Swenson (a nod to G. Swanson), who is press-ganged into protecting a young Puerto Rican tyke Phil Dawn (Adames), the 6-year-old son of her neighbors Jack and Jeri Dawn (Henry and Carmen), by the aftermath of the Dawn’s ruination at the hand of a mob clan.
The reluctant pairing of a recently bereft, peremptory kid and a childless, trigger-happy termagant takes a tough route in the purlieus of NYC (although it gives audience a wrong impression that a six-year-old can freely ride on a train or take a taxi in the land of freedom), and Cassavetes’s script has no tact in plot plausibility, police force is conspicuous by its own absence after their initial advent, and the ill-fated henchmen from gangster land don’t fare better either, often insipidly and frictionlessly overwhelmed by the outnumbered duo-on-the-lam. Ergo, the momentum is emphatically concatenated by Gloria and Phil’s consecutive hopping from one big yellow taxi to another, transiting from one transitory dwelling to another, concomitant with the bumpy ride of two strangers’ bonding process, to the point where great sacrifice is induced to end all the fracas.
Ms. Rowlands, as fabulous as ever, roundly commands our attention under her hubby’s close inspection, her Gloria, might be a far cry from a competent child rearer, but fo’ shizzle she knows how to handle ruthless yet code-of-honor adhering gangstas by exerting her feminine acuity and quick-on-the-draw second nature. It is a larger-than-life character, but Rowlands prevails with her inimitable flair and pizzazz that even the far-fetched happy ending cannot take the shine off her pervasive brilliance.
Moreover, the interplay between Gloria and Phil, beguilingly detracts from the mushy maternal bond default, also helped by an alternately rambunctious and biddable temperaments of a telegenic Adames (intentionally or not, it also implicitly reflects the sign of its times, how toxic masculinity takes its root at a boy’s young age), there is a rare balance of parity in the duo’s co-existence (which might surprise a prudish mind), far from being a trite exploitation of a childless woman’s effusing motherly love triggered by a cute, doe-eyed boy, in the end of the day, it is a goodhearted human being’s sense of justice and compassion that outflanks one’s primeval self-preserving rationale, and elevates Gloria into a very unlikely heroine.
Opening with Romare Bearden’s water colors, and dialing up Bill Conti’s soaring saxophone-heavy score, John Cassavetes’s GLORIA is as close as a genre practice among his output, while structural and narrative coherence may be in deficit, as far as watchability is concerned, it can still hold court thanks to a magnificent leading lady and Cassavetes’s unorthodox discernment and aesthetics.
referential entries: Luc Besson’s LÉON: THE PROFESSIONAL (1994, 8.6/10); Erick Zonca’s JULIA (2008, 7.1/10); Cassavetes’s OPENING NIGHT (1977, 8.1/10).
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