[Faces] is, I think, a great and courageous film in which Cassavetes has dared more than any American director in recent memory, and it is important to understand the nature of what he has done. (p. 217)

[Several] qualities have led to a few dissenting dismissals of Faces as "a home movie." But this charge confuses style with substance and misses entirely the compassionate intelligence which Cassavetes—who also wrote the script—brings to his subject. He has a shrewd and highly moral vision of the special quality of affluent middle-class life in America, circa now, baby. And for all the superficial looseness of the film, he never once loses track of his point. On the contrary, he keeps boring in on it from every possible angle.

Infidelity is really only a device to heighten Cassavetes's true subject, the banality of the way too many of us live. His...