Like a smack to the face followed by laughter, Faces assaults your expectations with its searing double portrait of gin-soaked marital dissolution and the couple’s thrashing attempts at respite in the arms of others. Raw and unrelenting, Cassavetes fully articulates his hyper-real brand of storytelling, drawing on the magnetic and vulnerable work of performers John Marley, Lynn Carlin, Seymour Cassel and Gena Rowlands. They generate an emotional tension unseen before on film, highlighting the almost-feral animus running through everyday relationships. He spent three years in post-production on the film, and the result pays off with a deeply troubling battle of the sexes, a film culturally urgent and psychologically acute. In short, Faces accomplishes what few films can: honestly portraying human behavior in its near-unutterable capacity for both cruelty and grace.
“John Cassavetes’ Faces is the sort of film that makes you want to grab people by the neck and drag them into the theater and shout: ‘Here!’ It would be a triumphant shout. What Cassavetes has done is astonishing. He has made a film that tenderly, honestly and uncompromisingly examines the way we really live.” – Roger Ebert
