Netflix’s John Cassavetes Kick Is Pure Irony

On a dark November night in 1958, John Cassavetes arrived at New York’s prestigious Paris Theater to debut his very first feature film, Shadows. The indie director had announced three free midnight screenings over the radio, hoping to garner some support for his premiere. There were 600 open seats in the single-screen venue, and even though free tickets were thought to beckon a bustling audience, Shadows barely filled 100 of them. It got worse: Herds of audience members stranded the theater before the film had rolled credits. Over 90 percent of the viewers were displeased with the film, the sound had major issues and the director himself was convinced the film needed more editing. Though he didn’t have the money, Cassavetes reworked the film for a 1959 re-release, thus marking the director’s scrappy roots in a hearty career of wholly independent filmmaking.
Over 60 years later, the Paris Theater was set to close for good. Cassavetes’ shoddy midnight screening would be an ancient relic left to history, no longer reverberating through the walls of the movie palace. Folks mourned the loss of the special landmark—until Netflix swooped in to save it. Save it… with a caveat. The streamer revived the theater in 2019, just months after it shuttered, to give a screening space for their major awards contenders. For example: Marriage Story, Noah Baumbach’s harrowing tale of divorce between a young, famous couple. This year, there are a handful of other Netflix awards contenders that boast stories similar to that of Marriage Story: Young couples in conflict. Plenty of realism; plenty of arguments. Movies that feel like independent dramas, when in reality, they’re backed by a company that passed Disney and AT&T in market cap last summer. Movies that are unapologetically inspired by Cassavetes works.
Netflix has released a bevy of potential contenders this year, but aside from David Fincher’s historical Mank and Spike Lee’s sweeping Da 5 Bloods, there are three separate Netflix films up for consideration this year that have one major commonality: Cassavetes. Two bear semblance to the director’s iconic, indie filmmaking style, while another prefers to lean on more blatant name-dropping. Pieces of A Woman, Malcolm & Marie and I’m Thinking of Ending Things all reference and pull inspiration from a congregation of films and creators; Cassavetes, however, has been a recurring name drop with the streamer since the release of Kaufman’s road trip twister last September. Just search “Cassavetes” in Google News and you’ll scroll through an assemblage of reviews citing the director as they summarize and draw comparisons. Why was Netflix drawn to Cassavetes-inspired films this year, and how do these films compare to the pioneer of independent cinema?
“Film is, to me, just unimportant,” Cassavetes once said. “But people are very important.” Here is the heart of the director’s philosophy on filmmaking, written in plain language. Above style, above linear storytelling and above any of the conventions of cinema at the time, Cassavetes desired to pen sincere characters and guide his actors to conscientious performances. Sure, impasses between a man and woman seemed to be a common thread in his films, but those plights gave way to realistic, soulful performances. By the end of a Cassavetes film, a viewer was meant to be conversant with the main characters’ tics, walking patterns, vocal inflection and emotion; every intimate detail. On top of that, Cassavetes was a master of the handheld camera, tracking his actors as they flicked cigarettes, waved their fists in the air or tucked their children into bed. Though these weren’t real stories, he wanted audiences to feel like a fly on the wall thanks to a cinéma vérité technique.
These Netflix films that grab from Cassavetes’ style all portray a man and woman in a relationship, all sparring, all young and fidgety—but do they embrace this pertinent character-driven storytelling? There’s not all that much going on in the films, so there’s room to get intimate with the lead pairings. Each film presents a shared dilemma—a couple’s sprawling argument, a miscarriage, two car rides full of bickering—and hones in on their reactions. The style of filmmaking employed may feel like a contemporary version of Cassavetes at first glance. But Cassavetes’ “style” was the wealth of authenticity, of layered performances, of complex stories—not just cinéma vérité of angsty young couples.
For example: Kornél Mundruzcó’s Pieces of a Woman prefers to chuck Cassavetes influences at its performers, resulting in a film that feels like Cassavetes Lite. Sean (Shia LaBeouf), a young man who’s just faced a miscarriage with his partner, navigates around the movie with so much anger and ferocity that the film begins to feel contrived. Pieces of a Woman lingers so long on its performances, ripping emotions out of each character as if it were tearing pages from a book, that it forgets to pursue a plot worth observing. It’s what a fan of Cassavetes might consider when they’ve run out of Cassavetes films to watch—sure, it’s got breathtaking performances and an angered young couple, but substituting Pieces of a Woman for an original Cassavetes is like trading a steaming hot cherry pie with buttery crust for uncooked dough. The shell is there. But looking inside, it’s clear that the sumptuous innards, what makes a pie a pie and a film a film, have been left out of the picture.