Features: DVD
There are films with vivid characters, gripping plots, and memorable lines. And then there are films like A Woman Under the Influence--films that reach into your heart and sear it with pain and joy. John Cassavetes gives us experiences as complex, demanding, and intense as life itself. As the filmmaker noted in an interview, most other films depend on a shorthand that allows us to view them in a fundamentally different way from the way we experience things outside of the movies. They employ a kind of code: See this. Think that. Get it? Got it. They tell us what to know and feel, what things mean. They make points. The result is a slight but decisive abstraction from everything in them. The viewer is always at a certain critical distance from what is on screen. These movies are about experience, rather than plunging us headlong into life, these movies tell us life-the way reading an essay about an experience is entirely different from having the experience. Cassavetes takes away the aboutness, the abstraction.
Editor's Note
John Cassavetes's A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE is an emotionally devastating drama that charts the mental disintegration of a California housewife. Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands) has no emotional or creative outlets. Instead, she pours all her energy into her family, spending her days waiting for her husband Nick (Cassavetes regular and COLUMBO star Peter Falk) to arrive home from work, and anxiously awaiting her children's return from school. This dependence causes Mabel to suffer a nervous breakdown, forcing her to spend time in a mental hospital. Meanwhile, Nick struggles mightily to keep his family together. When Mabel returns six months later, dazed and shaken, a "welcome home" party threatens to trigger another collapse.As the confused, overwhelmed, and hypersensitive Mabel, Rowlands delivers one of the screen's most excruciatingly honest performances. This can directly be attributed to Rowlands's real-life husband Cassavetes, whose insistence on getting to the inner core of his characters' emotional states defined him as an artist. Falk portrays Nick with a harsh yet delicate pathos that is also honest and heartbreaking. A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE is an awe-inspiring work of art from a maverick American director.
Plot Summary
Writer-director-actor John Cassavetes delivers an extremely gritty, unsentimental portrait of a troubled human existence. Gena Rowlands is Mabel Longhetti, a slightly mad Italian-American housewife who has absolutely no understanding of herself, or her individuality, other than through her family. When her deep psychological unhappiness and repression spiral too far out of control one evening, she is committed to an institution by her fed-up husband (an intense Peter Falk of the TV series COLUMBO); yet she returns six months later in worse shape than when she left. Rowlands's performance earned her a well-deserved Oscar nomination; real-life husband Cassavetes's directing also garnered him the same. The film is an emotionally draining, powerful work that stands as a historic American achievement from a wholly original auteur and pioneer working in the earliest days of independent film.
|
