A Woman Under the Influence

A Woman Under the Influence; drama, USA, 1974; D: John Cassavetes, S: Geena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Fred Draper, Lady Rowlands, Katherine Cassavetes

Los Angeles. A pipe break forces construction foreman Nick to stay all night at work, which cancels his plans to spend a romantic weekend with his wife, Mabel. Since she already sent her three kids away from their home to her mother's place, Mabel is disappointed and goes to meet a stranger in a bar, and then they become intimate at her home. The next morning, Nick and a dozen of his coworkers arrive at the home and Mabel makes spaghetti for them. Mabel is getting much more distraught, so a doctor sends her to a mental asylum to recover. Six months later, Nick and the relatives welcome Mabel back home, allegedly cured now. However, Mabel again starts acting nervously. The relatives leave. Mabel goes to the toilet and cuts her wrist with a razor, but Nick stops and slaps her. The kids go to bed, and Nick and Mabel calm down and tidy up the house.

Included in Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies, independent drama "A Woman Under the Influence" plays out more like a set of family home video episodes than a real film. The director and screenwriter John Cassavetes uses shaky, hand-held camera, telephoto lens, over-the-shoulder shots and huge close-up frames to conjure up a realistic, intimate and painfully authentic experience when the couple, Nick and Mabel, argue, without any music or larger artificial cinematic interventions, until the viewers can almost smell how it is to live there and then, though he does stumble here and there in some melodramatic scenes of Mabel's nervous breakdowns. "A Woman Under the Influence" plays out like a longer, less funny version of "Terms of Endearment", except that instead of a woman dying from cancer, here a woman is suffering from a psychosis. Geena Rowlands plays the character of a psychologically disturbed woman very well, yet do her random shenanigans hold up that well today? Not really. The dialogues are mostly bland, only intermittently saying something memorable ("Talk to your kids? They never listen."). At 2.5 hours the movie is too long, with too many excessive and unnecessary little details (a co-worker spills his spaghetti from the plate during the lunch sequence; an hour into the film, there is a sequence of a naked 5-year old girl running around the house, which should not have been displayed directly on the camera) that could have been cut, whereas the point at the end isn't that clear—is the message that a couple can drive each other crazy, go to various lows, experience a dramatic crisis, and then just bounce back to normal, as if nothing happened, because they developed an indestructible relationship plasticity? Yet its weird moments of humor and idiosyncratic behavior (Nick arrives with a dozen (!) corworkers at his home, unannounced (!), and Mabel now has to cook spaghetti for all of them; a coworker singing almost like in an opera during the spaghetti lunch, while Mabel tilts her head and curiously looks at his mouth) have some spark, and as weird or trivial as some situations look, you can identify with a lot of them.

Grade:++