If Gena Rowlands were getting a makeover on one of the chat shows, they d tell her to cut her hair to a sensible length and stop trying to look like a 1950s sex bomb, but what her look tells you is that you get the whole package: She s bringing along the past, the glamor, and all those blowzy, confused, desperate women she played for her husband, the late John Cassavetes. You want my theory about the hairstyle? John liked it that way.
In Unhook the Stars, the directorial debut of their son, Nick Cassavetes, Rowlands plays a calmer version of the high-energy, neurotic heroines of Opening Night, Love Streams, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, and all those other Cassavetes dramas in which the characters drank and smoked and tried to settle right now! things that could never be settled at all. In the current movie she s a widow named Mildred, comfortably well off, living in a house that s too big for her now that her husband has died, her son is prospering in