A Woman Under the Influence

This is just another confirmation that Cassavetes, along with Dreyer and Tarkovsky, is one of the very small number of geniuses in film, whose every film is an extension of their genius -- some more mature than others, but impossible to be "bad"; they are beyond terms like "good" or "bad" -- they are the great art works of the century.

This film isn't about a "crazy" lady; it's not about putting a woman in an institution; and it's not about people talking about your crazy wife, though all of this happens in the film. Those are merely the events that take place over the course of the film; what it's really about is our misunderstanding, our experience as an audience. Just like the characters, we misunderstand Mable's childlike actions. What Cassavetes does is turn *us* into children -- it's as if we're experiencing things for the first time all over again, because it's a totally new experience, the same with watching a movie like "Andrei Rublev." That is an amazing thing to pass onto an audience. That's why I've never been bored watching a Cassavetes film -- something is always happening, things are always changing. The reality of what we're seeing is always undergoing augmentation, so we can never get fully situated.

It's never unrelenting gloom the way many so-called realistic films are (and this film goes far beyond mere "realism"); it's devastating watching it, watching Mable ask people if they want spaghetti one by one. But it's loving when Nick jokes about someone hugging her too long. It's communal during a scene at a dinnertable where Mable takes a pride in feeding "her boys." But each scene goes through a transformation as it happens. When Mable goes home with another man, he makes it clear that he's not to be used, but also that she shouldn't punish herself. It's not a screamy moment with a woman hiding in the bathroom; his avuncular twang is disarming.

There's a complete lack of self-consciousness in the film, and I mean that in terms of the characters (during Mable's key freak out scene, Rowlands does, I think, go too far) -- that's why the kids are s terrific in the film. When a boy says, "It's the best I can do, mom," it's an incredible moment because it's managed to be included without being offensive, mugging for the camera with cuteness. The film has such a strange relationship with kids -- they're like little people. And if that sounds odd, you'll understand when you see the film. The characters are constantly changing their minds; they're so aware of themselves that they're unaware -- Mable doesn't realize she's giving off a sexual aura (despite the fact that Rowlands can at times look like a blond beach babe). As with Julianne Moore in "Safe," we don't know what's wrong with her. She's a frenetic, guideless woman trying to do the guiding.

The way Cassavetes sets up the film, with ominous piano music that comes in when Falk is trying to speak, blinded by frustration; or setting the film inside this house with gigantic rooms, makes everything feel larger and emptier at the same time. It's like the scariness of the echo of something you'd rather not hear. Someone said that they wouldn't want a single frame of "2001" to be cut, lest the experience be changed. I think that applies more aptly to Cassavetes' films, because he never treads over the same thing twice, even when he's doing exactly the same thing he's just done. It's always something new. 9/10

This movie is a breakthrough - courageous and uncompromising view at the family and at the marriage where both spouses love each other deeply but they are both not well, they don't know how communicate when somebody else present, even their own children. They could be happy on the deserted island but not surrounded by friends and families. I was fascinated by both, Peter Falk's and Gena Rowlands' performances. She looked like a little girl, trapped in a woman's body - confused, insecure, listening to what is inside of her. When she said to her children, "I hope that you will never grow up", she meant it because she never felt comfortable as a grown up. I could not take my yes off Rowlands. Her performance is on par with the best study of nervous breakdown I've seen, and this is Liv Ullmann in Bergman's "Face to Face".

Peter Falks was also a revelation - I love him as Lt. Columbo in the TV series but he is a completely different character here; in a way, he is as mentally unbalanced as his wife is. The fact that he loves her but never hesitates to abuse her makes him terrifying - you never know how he will act in the next moment, and he does not know himself. Directing and writing are absolutely first class, and I am very exited to see more films by John Cassavetes, the Godfather of American Independent film-making and a father of American "New Wave" 9.5/10

Textbook gender related observation: When Jack Nicholson's character acts eccentric in One Flew Over the Cuuko's Nest, nobody will believe he's crazy. When Gena Rowland's character is eccentric in this film, everyone assumes she is.

But that is only one of many realisations one makes observing A Woman Under the Influence. It is an intricate film, as was John Cassavetes a filmmaker who always filled his films with as many things as possible. Whatever his films were about, it always had to do with the truth of human nature and human life in modern society. In one example of great main leads in his films, Cassavetes' real-wife Rowlands is playing Mabel, the woman of the title, the house-wife of a Peter Falk's construction foreman Nick. Everybody knows that Mabel is more or less "crazy". Why does everybody "know" this? She is eccentric, has got funny mannerisms, at time she talks and acts randomly about things that make no sense. She is a human being with a desire to achieve, but nobody has ever given her attention or respect as an individual. I think Mabel's crisis is first and foremost that of an identity crisis. She is empty inside, Nick says. That's because nobody has bothered to look inside. Upon the demanding adult roles society demands on her, in particular the task of motherhood, the result is breakdown. She is a house-wife who spends her days wandering around the house trance-like, she cooks and cleans and sews and all the time she acts as if that somehow would be an absurdity. She tries to be nice to the guests but it all results in awkward silence and embarrassment. What should she be doing, then? Who is she?

I think any viewer judging that she is in fact "insane" is an enemy to the film's intent and soul. Rowlands portrait of this woman is a hauntingly perfect portrayal of mental illness, certainly, but her state is that of extreme confusion rather than being someone who's simply "lost it". This is a woman aimlessly struggling to get out of a sea of under-nourished self-esteem and identity loss. We don't know how or when it started, but the more into the film we get the more we understand. Her mind is like a tapestry that Cassavetes gradually unfolds. In the first scene she is running around trying to place her children in the car for a trip with their grandmother's. Cassavetes knows that the clever viewer will relate the title's "influence" to that of gender related, domestic pressure. But that's only the beginning, I think, of what this woman is suffering from. It's not until the end we realise that maybe her family wasn't all that supportive of her, her father seems genuinely uninterested in whatever any diagnosis could be and her mother is just Mabel's fourth child. And if Mabel is crazy, Falk's character of Nick is certainly just as crazy. We don't realise that until after a while either. But he acts just as random upon situations he's not familiar with, and he also has bursts of eccentric (mis)behaviour. You'll have to look more closely to discover this perhaps, he is after all a friendly looking male patriarch and your brain is less inclined to view him as crazy.

Mabel, who is still dependent on him and her domestic safety (that's the crux, I think, of her entire problem), says "I'll be anything you want" and Nick tells her to be herself. But she hasn't got a personality of her own, her emotions conflict her roles and duties but neither become clear to her. What's worse, nobody is interested in her, or has the slightest notion she might have anything worthwhile. "Be yourself", Nick says, but in fact he's not interested in who she is, and he is (without giving too much thought to it) putting demands on her, expecting her to fulfill her duties which is one of the very reasons she's all messed up. He's just not that clever. It's not just that he is a blue collar guy, he seems totally unable to communicate personally with his wife and, certainly, with his children. Basically, he hasn't got much of a personality either, but being a man that reasoning is considered as abstract and not a psychological case. In any case, Nick and Mabel surely love each other, but none of them have the capacity to cope with one another, or even comprehend their surroundings. Towards the end of the film, all Nick can tell Mabel is "Stop what you're doing". There's a childish desperation in him that is channeled through his gender but just as "crazy" as Mabel's lack of self-confidence and self-realising even.

I said that you observe this film, and I mean it. It is more than realistic, it is profoundly real. Everyone have met couples like Mabel and Nick, couples who's lack of harmony and functionality is so great, it can't stay behind the social curtain. I'm saying that as point of reference. We've all left the dinner table at some point. "Maybe it's time we'd go home". As much as any documentary, Cassavetes films moved in real time, here and now, portraying life as it is. He knew that realism doesn't mean tragedy or brutality. Life is rarely dramatic and offers no cathartic finales. Life just is what we are living, it's not easy to comprehend and it doesn't offer security. For the future, we feel great hope but we also feel great fear. This film has got horrible moments, but it's horrible moments of truth. It's also got humorous moments of truth. These judgments are in a sense arbitrary. It's real life. It's the rarely seen beauty of truth that Cassavetes conjured up in his films. Rowlands is there to capture the essence of it, the notion that we are all human beings who need and deserve to be loved, no matter if we have table manners or not.

Freewheeling Cassavetes study of a marriage.

I think its a misreading to conclude that either one of the main characters is "crazy". Clearly Mabel has what you could call a borderline manic personality, but there's little evidence that she is unable to look after herself or her kids. The fact that she gets committed says less about her condition than about the position of women in the society Cassavetes is depicting. There is no sign that the visiting kids are in any danger - their father freaks out only because Mabel's behaviour falls outside his view of the conventional housewife. Nick on the other hand is not considered "crazy" despite physically attacking several people and getting his kids drunk, because men are allowed a lot more licence. In the end he is as trapped by the social pressures on him as Mabel is, except his frustration is turned outwards, hers inwards.

When the family are alone there is no problem, Nick's difficulties arise when Mabel is unable to fit the social role assigned to her - notably it is his mother who drives him to have Mabel committed. The "influence" Mabel is under turns out not to be alcohol as we first expect but patriarchy expressed via Nick, and society's limited and limiting expectations of women and of people in general. Put Mabel in a San Francisco commune 6 years earlier and she would look normal.

A word on the acting. Having known people with rather more serious cases of manic depression I can testify that Gena Rowlands' acting is actually rather understated. Falk meanwhile is a revelation to those who know him only from Colombo - his portrayal of the inarticulate, confused, occasionally violent but still very loving Nick is perfect - he just IS this guy.

Incidentally, you can see where Scorsese took many of the ideas for his most personal films from (notably "Mean Streets" which apparently he made after Cassavetes criticised "Boxcar Bertha") although he tidied them up and made them commercial. He even copied Cassevetes' lead here by putting his own mother in "Goodfellas".

This is a film about need, about affection, about a desperate need of affection that consumes the heart of Mabel Longhetti, the "woman under the influence" ... Some might say she's a troubled woman suffering from a personality disorder, others would say she's just psychotic ... they couldn't be wronger : she couldn't have a personality disorder, since she doesn't have any personality at all. Her character is totally diluted into that desperate need to please, to make people comfortable. The painful paradox is that this desire creates even more awkward and uncomfortable situations. But Mabel isn't aware of that, she can't understand that because she has buried any desire to be someone under the profound will to make people she loves, happy. She's sweet and tender, but this sweetness is wrong because it's inspired by a double fear of rejection and confrontation.

Mabel crystallizes all these feelings and translates them in a behavior made of unpredictable excitability, a forced cheerfulness, a childish behavior she almost uses as a shield not to be hurt. She's afraid, and so are we, when we watch this poor woman trying to gain anyone's sympathy, just to please Nick, her husband. Mabel is played by the beautiful Gena Rowlands in what I consider the greatest cinematic female performance ever. Peter Falk is underrated as Nick, the husband who tries to deal with Mabel's condition, with such severity sometimes, that even himself can't control his own reactions.

This is the set-up of the film, it's a drama, that couldn't have been directed by anyone but the great John Cassavettes. It's not a thriller, not an action film, yet it provided some of the most heart-pounding moments I've ever experienced. Never had a lunch and a dinner scene been so uneasy to watch : as it's been mentioned before, Mabel doesn't want to hurt people's feeling yet she unconsciously does. Mabel is like a little flame that might, at any time, light a bag of powder. Mabel creates real tickling-bomb situations, where the explosion is a burst of emotions, so human watching the film feels indecent. That's Cassavetes genius, this is no voyeuristic movie because we don't enjoy watching such devastation in a family that has everything to be happy. It's no voyeurism, it's realism, its cinema-verity as its purest form. Every laugh makes us smile, every shout makes us vibrate. Every silence makes us feel uncomfortable. We watch, we wait, and we never have a feeling that nothing is happening. Every look on Gena's eyes, every way she deforms her face, every noise or weird hand gesture she makes is the expression of a poor little a soul trying to communicate a part of what remains in the bottom, what remains of Mabel's personality.

Confronted to Mabel's emotional clumsiness, Nick looks totally helpless, yet he's not exempt from reproaches. He's not crazy but his own temper probably aggravated Mabel's condition. He warns his colleague, "Mabel is not crazy", but he insists so much, you wonder why would someone say that about a 'normal' woman. The answer is that he thinks she's crazy, but loves her so much he doesn't want people to think she is. Nick loves so much his wife he puts himself in situations making him act like a bag of contradictions. Nick himself looks sometimes desperate as he doesn't know what he's doing, lost between his responsibilities as a father, a son, a husband who loves his wife, and a man devoured by a frustrated violence. Seeing him trying to act like a father makes you put Mabel's insanity into perspective. If Mabel acts under Nick's influence, Nick's life and behavior are equally influenced by Mabel's problem, the effects on the couple, on the family and the relationships with the friends are disturbingly heart-breaking.

Disturbing, Cassavetes' masterpiece is because it reflects our own fears with a gripping realism, it's a journey into the deepest bottom of the human soul, made of anger, fear, sadness, happiness, reason, craziness, men, women, children, human relationships. It's hard to watch, it's uncomfortable, we can't help but feel sorry for the poor Mabel, for these poor kids, and even for Nick. They're not pathetic because they're not quite passive. In fact, the movie is full of noise, of loud shouts, of movements, this is no swimming in an ocean of tears, this is not your typical tear-jerker drama, it's almost like an emotional thriller. In fact, this doesn't need any categorization, this film makes other films look like films. "A Woman under the Influence"'s direction turns it into a chaotic journey into human relationships, and a very exhausting experience in reality.

Gena Rowlands gave the best performance I've ever seen, and the fact she won or not an Oscar doesn't even matter ... these considerations normalize the movie when it's more than something you would nominate for an award. Cassavettes's masterpiece is a tunnel ride into the depths of the human soul with its dark sides, and a probable light of hope at the end.