Opening Night (1977)

The acting in Opening Night is superb - easily the best part of the movie. Gena Rowlands is wonderful as an extremely troubled actress. The parts that are the most arresting are when we see Rowlands' character in her everyday life and how she is completely losing control. However, this is interspersed with long scenes showing us the play she's working on. They never quite show us the play as it's supposed to be so I had no frame of reference. Characters later would refer to its being wrong, which left me confused. Since I had nothing to measure the play against, I simply felt like each time I saw it it had been rewritten a bit and I didn't know when it was considered a success and when it wasn't. The entire last half hour of the movie was scenes from the play. Did she succeed? Did she change it? Did she completely rework it into a different play? People seemed to like it at the end, but I had no idea what I was supposed to take from it, or from the movie as a whole. 3 stars.