"Begun when Cassavetes was already quite ill, (and) richly self-reflective, Love Streams allows Cassavetes to revisit scenes, characters, and events from his previous works and to meditate on the meaning of a life lived in art" (Raymond Carney). Cassavetes portrays a disillusioned writer, Robert Harmon, and Gena Rowlands, his sister Sarah in this film that is about the blows and buttresses of family in a more complicated way than any of Cassavetes' earlier works. Based on a play by Cassavetes' close friend Ted Allan (author of Lies My Father Told Me), who also co-wrote the script, the film works the brother-sister relationship as one Janus-faced character: Robert, who runs away from any children he may have fathered in order to continue being the child himself, and Sarah, perpetually maternal and insistently happy, who believes that everyone needs something -anything-to love. (Thus her arrival at Robert's home with a taxi full of pets.) Like Sarah, Cassavetes always before seems to have said that you can't have too much love. But here are two lives dead-ending-Robert's in dissipation and Sarah's in divorce from husband Seymour Cassel-precisely from too much loving. In other words the male breakdowns in Husbands and Faces and the female ones in A Woman Under the Influence and Opening Night converge in Love Streams. But for Cassavetes the crack-ups are the most fruitful moments of life; they teach us how to stop faking it. It was Gloria who snapped at her little charge, "Just don't be phoney; I hate that." Now it is Sarah who gaily telephones her husband, "Jack? I'm almost not crazy now."