Take 31: A Woman Under the Influence
I had never seen any of John Cassavetes work before starting this project, so I went into this film as a totally blank slate, excited that the word “woman” was right there in the title, promising a female centered story. Of course, there was also a fair amount of anxiety about what kind of influence that woman would be under — especially given the male director and the 1970s release date. I walked away full of emotion, and overwhelmed by what I just had experienced. This is probably the first film on the list that felt entirely unique and unlike anything I had ever seen before (with the possible exceptions of Mulholland Drive or Nashville, which feel like appropriate distant cousins of Cassavetes’ voyeuristic portrait of a woman unhinged from reality).
The first, obvious, quality about the film is that Gena Rowlands portraying the Mabel Longhetti was mesmerizing — she is always in full command of the character and the craftsmanship it takes to embody her mental discord with non-judgmental empathy is evident. That’s a tough line to walk without slipping into melodrama or hysteria. Rowlands hits the sweet spot, finding a way to gaze right back at us while we question her motives and the root cause of what makes her tick differently, suggesting that if we can find the answer she would love to know as well. The word “insecurity” comes up often to describe her erraticism, and while that’s surely an understatement, it does seem laced through most of her actions.
There’s a familiarity to her behavior — when people on the street rush by as she abrasively asks for the time because she needs to pick up her kids, I knew at times I had been the person skipping by avoiding eye contact. The moment she embraces her kids as they climb off the bus, I reverted to seeing her through their eyes, with a mixture of relief that she’s there, and a shock of fear that she’s responsible for them. She yearns to pass as normal in their estimation, just as she craves the same reassurance of sanity from her husband. This self aware quality distances her the performance from mocking extremity, there is an appropriate amount of restraint just as there is in most people who live outside the rhythm of the majority.
The irony of the film is that Mabel’s sanity is always in question, and her husband, Nick, is regarded as the level headed member of the pair. I began the film thinking this is the story of either Mabel’s descent into psychological excursion, or her heroic climb out of it. The trick of it is that Nick’s behavior is equally endangering and traumatic to the children, and seemingly unexplainable to his peers, but he remains above reproach. At first, I thought this was just me seeing through Cassavetes’ bullshit, but eventually I realized this was part of what he was intending to capture, and he achieves this goal with delicacy and grace. When Nick pulls the kids out of school after their mother was committed for an overcast beach day, he implores and demands that they have fun, eventually deciding that a better option to salve their pain is splitting a six pack with the young kids in the back of a truck on the way home. As they all stumble into their beds and refuse to eat dinner, the extent to which the collective mental struggles of their parents were burrowing deep into their psyches is put under the spotlight. However, that’s nothing compared to the day their mother comes home from the institution and they try to fight Nick off of her while he screams threats that he will kill her and the children right in front of them.
Cassavetes performs magic here by encapsulating three generations of familial strife from two distinctive points of view, neither of which is reliable. This presents a poignant question about marriage that is worth examining. We hope that our partners excavate our best sides and that we do the same for them, but what if in the process we dig too deep and cause each other to both crack up, leaving no one with a firm enough grip to yank us back? This is what we witness in A Woman Under the Influence in an extreme capacity, but on a micro scal,e it is something that most people in long term committed relationships will find traces of in their own partnerships. At times, it can feel like desperate codependency. I questioned who was more responsible for the rupture, Nick or Mabel. Was it Mabel’s mania that pushed Nick into his violent disturbing outbursts, or was it his violence that extinguished her sense of self so thoroughly she could never fully regain it, instead depending on Nick to guide her into normalcy? I don’t think we’re supposed to know the answer to that and it’s probably safe to assume that each of these weaknesses exacerbated the other.
Even the house the Longhetti’s live in is ripe with discord. I was often confused about where I was in the house. The parents sleep in the dining room, tucking away the bed every morning, but at times it looks like they’re also upstairs? Why is there a giant “Private” sign on a door that could be locked? It’s confusing and I felt that Cassavetes was mirroring the confusion and fog of Mabel and Nick in their surroundings. Like them, we are often asking where are we and why are we here? This feeling of disorientation is integrated into other technical layers of the film. There’s little context for the opening scene just as there is very little resolution. When Mabel gets drunk and brings a man home from a bar, it’s easy to question if that decision was made because Nick stood her up, and that maybe the influences she was most inclined towards were alcohol and men. When I was watching the film, I was fairly certain the random first scene guy was the human equivalent to the gun that is mentioned in the first act, and must be fired in the second. But Cassavetes resists the urge, instead allowing the paranoia of that reveal to fester in our brains, just as it undoubtedly does when Mabel sobers up and endeavors to regain her foothold on her life.
I didn’t know while I was watching the film that Cassavetes and Rowlands were married in real life, and when I read this alot of what I had just seen clicked. Many of the friends that Nick invites over are their real life pals, and each of their mothers are cast as the respective mother in laws in the film. I’m normally a staunch opponent of gimmicky casting, especially when the real life relation can’t act, but this is an exception. The rawness resonates because it feels close to the subjects. Cassavetes allows us to experience possibly the greatest intimacy I’ve ever seen on screen. Most people can recall vivid moments of intense familial tension and that creeping feeling of dread, despair, and desperation for a return to normalcy is all on display in the Longhetti’s home with devastating detail.
Make no mistake, this is a good movie, but I found it to be intensely gut wrenching, to the point where I paused it three times in the last half hour to see how much longer I would need to endure it. That is what puts A Woman Under the Influence close to the most unique films I’ve ever seen, I was captivated by the work every second of the way and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. By the end of the 2.5 hour runtime, we as the viewer have fully devoured Cassavetes and Rowlands’ hearts on a platter, and it is a feat of nauseating proportions. I’ll end with a quote from Robert Ebert on the film that presents yet another layer of depth, and left me spinning in the Longhetti world even further:
One of the things we can ask of an artist is that he leave some record of how it was for him, how he saw things, how he coped. Movies are such a collaborative medium that we rarely get the sense of one person, but Cassavetes at least got it down to two: himself and Rowlands. The key to his work is to realize that it is always Rowlands, not the male lead, who is playing the Cassavetes role. (source)
