Elliot's Watching week of 5/16/21: Tehran, Cassavetes

 Elliot’s Watching week of 5/16/21

The 8-episode (first) season of the Israeli Shenhar - Syrkin spy-thriller Tehran (2020) is tense and exciting from the first moment, as we follow the sometimes disastrous and ill-fated mission of a young woman (Niv Sultan as Tamar Rabinyan)   who’s an Israeli agent in the Mossad assigned to a dangerous mission: She flies into Tehran with faked documents w/ the assignment of gaining entry into a Tehran electric-power company to hack the computer system and shut down power across Iran in preparation for an Israeli strike against nuclear plants. A lot of things can go wrong with this scheme, and most do: she’s nearly “made” by a chance airport encounter, and she rouses the ire of a high-ranking man in the Iran military/spy agency, a man who himself is open to bribery and coercion. It’s perhaps too much to expect that this mission and its outcome would be realistic or even possible, though anyone who’s seen the recent Netflix series The Spy (unlike Tehran, it’s based closely on true events) will accept that the Mossad asks the impossible of its agents. So despite a few botched moments when we though why the hell doesn’t she just get out of there alive the series is a great entertainment w/ lots of surprising twists and reversals. 

The 1997 John Cassavetes film, Opening Night, starring JC’s wife Gena Rowlands as a movie star cast as the lead in a Broadway play in which a woman has major blow-out scenes with her husband and an ex, has some great moments and in fact was looking to be a pretty great film altogether until we got to the grossly disappointing final act (of both the movie and the play it depicts). The fist is that Rowlands’s Myrtle Gordon is a major star, constantly put upon for autographs etc.; leaving the theater after one (out-of-town) rehearsal, Myrtle watches as an ardent young fan is hit and killed by a passing car. Myrtle becomes obsessed with this death, pays a visit to the shiva service (and is scorned and told to go home); over the course of the film, Myrtle becomes increasingly erratic and alcohol-dependent. In one take on the play (The Second Woman) she does well, using her self-destructive madness to drive the character she’s portraying on the stage; in a later performance she is completely out of control, obviously blowing all of her lines, and strangely the audience loves this performance; who in the audience can tell if she’s on or off script? By the end, at the Broadway opening, she staggers into the theater and sobers up, sort of, just enough to stagger through her role; in the final act, she’s clearly lost control and the whole act - a dialog w/ her husband, played by husband Cassavetes - is ad-libbed (it’s possible that the 2 really did improvise this scene - I don’t know) and again the audience loves this, laughing heartily. The problem is: There’s nothing funny about their dialog, and if this were really an opening-night performance I would say the audience would storm out of the theater, outraged. I get that the movie shows great pathos for this deeply troubled woman, but an honest assessment of the quality of her performance and a more balanced look at how her behavior hurts so many people, including her fellow actors and the playwright, would have made this movie more honest and admirable.