Mabel (Gena Rowlands) and Nick (Peter Falk) have been lovingly married for years and have three elementary-aged children, despite Mabel's increasingly unstable state. However, after one too many awkwardly inappropriate incidents in front of friends, family and neighbors, Nick loses all patience with his wife and has her committed to a mental hospital.
While she's gone--and director Cassavetes never shows us anything from Mabel's perspective while she's away, making the implied all the more haunting--Nick proves to be the one with the problems. He can't control his temper, and flies off the handle at anyone and everyone who so much as blinks at him wrong. It becomes clear that while Mabel may have once simply been charmingly eccentric, it's likely the stress and emotional/psychical abuse of living with Nick was what sent her over the edge.
Both leads give phenomenal performances in what must have been a nerve-rattling film shoot for everyone involved. Rowlands plays Mabel like a whacked-out Lucille Ball, with hints of Blanche DuBois, but still makes the character completely her own strange, living, breathing entity. Falk is appropriately infuriating as her fumbling manchild of a husband, and while neither of them is likable, you still end up hoping that they'll make it work somehow.
Cassavetes obviously knows how to film arguments like few others, but Woman would have benefited from a bit more character study aside from fleeting moments revealed in the heat of a yelling match. All in all, it's not a perfect movie, and it certainly can't be called an enjoyable one, but it's more powerful and provocative than most films are ever able to be. I'm glad I saw it.
I always say this, but A Woman Under The Influence is the most intimate film ever made. And Cassavetes purposely kept the relationship between Mabel and Nick at arms length through the film, he felt it was more about the individuals reactions to the relationship rather than the relationship itself, so the colder the better. He even went as far as cutting a scene of them lovingly walking down the street hand in hand.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. You say it`s the most intimate film, yet admit that it`s cold and the characters are at arms` length. I just don`t think the whole approach gels 100%. I definitely appreciate the uncomfortable feeling it generates in the viewer, and the way it makes you confront said feeling. I just think it has its flaws.
ReplyDeleteDon`t mind the wonky apostrophes, I`m not on my own computer right now!
It is the most intimate in that it doesn't pull any punches. Nothing is softened or made more easily digested. Cassavetes makes you see everything. The film isn't about the love between the two characters, it is about the dysfunction.
ReplyDeleteFair enough, and its admirable for that--I just think both leads are a little too over the top as characters, with no hints as to whether they've always been that way or what. At times it just seemed like "let's throw two crazy people on screen and see what happens", which is not to sell the film short--a lot of good stories have been made on exactly that premise. If that was the intention, then it did a fine job. I would have liked it more if it wasn't just that, however.
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