Faces (1968 film)

Faces is a 1968 American drama film written, produced, and directed by John Cassavetes. It is his fourth directorial work. The film, shot in cinéma vérité-style, depicts the final stages of the disintegrating marriage of a middle-aged couple, played by John Marley and newcomer Lynn Carlin. Cassavetes regulars Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel, Fred Draper and Val Avery also star.

Initial critical reception to the film was somewhat polarized, but it went on to gain widespread acclaim, and the film is now considered one of the most demonstrative and influential works of the New Hollywood movement.

At the 29th Venice International Film Festival, the film won the Pasinetti Prize and the Best Actor Award for John Marley. At the 41st Academy Awards, it received three Oscar nominations – Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor for Cassel, and Best Supporting Actress for Carlin. In 2011, Faces was added to the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Plot
The film, shot in cinéma vérité-style, depicts the final stages of the disintegrating marriage of a couple (John Marley and Lynn Carlin). Various groups and individuals with whom the couple interacts after the husband's sudden statement of his desire for a divorce are introduced. Afterwards, he spends the night in the company of brash businessmen and prostitutes, while the wife spends it with her middle-aged female friends and an aging, free-associating playboy they had picked up at a bar. The night proceeds as a series of tense conversations and confrontations occurs.

Production
Faces was Cassevetes' fourth directorial work, and was entirely self-financed by Cassavetes and his wife Gena Rowlands. The cast allegedly worked for no pay, but were promised profit participation. Filming, including protracted rehearsals, took place over the course of eight months in locations throughout Los Angeles, including Cassavetes' house. The film was shot in high-contrast 16 mm black and white film stock.

Lynn Carlin had no prior acting experience when she was cast as Maria Forst. She was working as a secretary for Robert Altman at the time, and Cassavetes often hired her as a script reader and casting assistant. After she was fired by Altman, Cassavetes cast her in Faces, and she earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her debut performance.

Steven Spielberg worked as an unpaid runner.

Versions
As is the case with several of Cassavetes' films, several different versions of Faces are known to exist (though it was generally assumed that, after creating the general release print, Cassavetes destroyed the alternative versions). It was initially premiered in Canada with a running time of 183 minutes, before Cassavetes cut it down to 130 minutes.

Though the 130-minute version is the general release version, a print of a longer version with a running time of 147 minutes was accidentally found by Ray Carney, and was deposited at the Library of Congress. 17 minutes of this print were included in the Criterion box set John Cassavetes: Five Films, though Carney has said that there are numerous differences between the two films.

Reception
Faces holds an 85% approval rating on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 26 reviews with an average rating of 7.3/10. Roger Ebert gave the film 4 out of 4 stars and wrote that the film "tenderly, honestly, and uncompromisingly examines the way we really live".

Manny Farber wrote of Lynn Carlin's performance, "Carlin is near perfection, playing the deepest well of unexplored emotions as the wife of a rubber-faced business wow who seems like a detestable ham walk-on until he surprisingly lodges into the film's center for good." Paul Schrader, for the Los Angeles Free Press, wrote "Faces" is a film with a confused on-screen life, but with a rich cocktail party life-span."

Pauline Kael, however, was negative to this film, criticizing the "badly performed" acting and "crudely conceived" scenes.

In a retrospective review for Slant Magazine, Jeremiah Kipp wrote "Cassavetes was interested in actors and their freak-show intensities, and their performances give his films a hyper-real quality."

Faces, and other Cassavetes projects, had significant creative impact on Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Robert Altman. James Benning's Faces (2010) is a found footage remake or reconstruction of Cassavetes' film. It lasts exactly as the original, but it just consists of silent slowed-down close-ups of the characters, which are on screen for as long as they are in the original.

Recognition
In 2011, Faces was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The Registry called the film "an example of cinematic excess" whose extended confrontations revealed "emotions and relations of power between men and women that rarely emerge in more conventionally structured films".