Sara Batkie
“Does she win or does she lose?” According to lore, this is the question actress Gena Rowlands asked writer-director-husband John Cassavetes about her character in Opening Night. It’s an interesting dichotomy to contemplate, given the sweeping complexity of that work. In some ways, it could apply to almost any of their ten collaborations over their decades-long creative and romantic partnership. But it takes on a particularly thorny resonance when considered in relation to 1974’s A Woman Under the Influence, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this week. After all, what does it mean to win or lose when the “adversary” is your own family?
Woman was originally conceived as a play, but the script Cassavetes wrote was too intense and emotionally demanding for Rowlands to perform eight times a week. The two received pushback on it every step of the way; “No one wants to see a crazy, middle-aged dame,” he was reputedly told when seeking financing for the project. Cassavetes ended up mortgaging their house while co-star and friend Peter Falk invested $500,000 after reading the screenplay. They shot in a real Los Angeles property with a limited crew, many culled from the American Film Institute where Cassavetes was serving as their first filmmaker-in-residence. Several cast members were also relatives, including both Rowlands and Cassavetes’s mothers and one of their children. Once complete, it struggled to find a distributor and only began gaining attention when it won awards on the festival circuit.
Now, of course, it’s viewed as one of the couple’s crowning achievements, and a staggering showcase for Rowlands’s singular talents. But it also can’t be denied that watching it is a distinctly grueling endeavor. It runs one-hundred and forty-seven minutes, and pretty much every second is fraught with tension. Aside from a handful of scenes set at Nick’s workplace, the film rarely leaves the hermetic seal of the rooms where he and wife Mabel lob their domestic bombs at one another. It’s the sort of immersive cinematic experience that could genuinely provoke PTSD, even in viewers who didn’t grow up in homes as riven by conflict as the Longhetti’s. The only real chance the audience gets to breathe is during the “Six months later” intertitle that flashes between its uneven halves.
When we meet Nick and Mabel, they already seem on the precipice of disaster, even as we sense it’s one they’ve dealt with before. They have a date night planned. Mabel has shuffled off the three kids to her mother’s. But Nick, who works as a construction foreman, is waylaid by a municipal accident, keeping him out all night. Abandoned to her own devices, Mabel goes to a bar, drinks too much, and lets a stranger take her home.
What follows, though, is not the expected scene of marital strife. Instead we’re treated to the first of several extended sequences set at the Longhetti dinner table as Nick, without notifying Mabel ahead of time, brings his entire crew home for a meal of spaghetti. Cassavetes’s camerawork here is intimate and observant, like their most attentive guest. Nick and Mabel sit at opposite ends of the table and his framing keeps them separated as the conversation unfolds in real time, lingering on the dawning alarm on the men’s faces as Mabel’s behavior becomes increasingly inappropriate until Nick finally explodes at her.
It’s a challenging scene in both length and content, but it never feels indulgent. While many films of similar runtime “earn” their length by being crowded with incident, Woman is brimming with character moments. Earlier on, Nick tells a coworker, “Mabel’s not crazy. I don’t know what she is, but she’s not crazy.” What Cassavetes and his actors are doing is helping us understand what Nick can’t. Rowlands plays Mabel with a childlike guilelessness that might be charming in other circumstances. Whether wandering the empty house or crowded streets, she often seems to be following along to music no one else can hear. She makes spastic gestures as if her body is trying to leap out of its skin. While the men are eating, her idea of making polite conversation is to ask each of them their names, even the ones she’s apparently met before. For her there are no boundaries between the world of adults and that of children, which makes her dangerous to both. Her kids adore her, but grownups regard her with suspicion, even disdain.
This includes Nick, who eventually has Mabel committed to a psychiatric hospital. “We’re supposed to be on the inside,” she pleads with him before she’s taken away, which is both an appeal to happier times and an admission of their co-dependence. Nick, too, has his issues, as Falk’s aching performance demonstrates. He has a hair-trigger temper, which can cause him to simultaneously defend and abuse his wife. Once she’s gone, he seems lost at sea – screaming at his co-workers and causing an accident at a work site; pulling his kids out of school to take them to the beach, giving them sips of beer. Cassavetes’s intent with this interlude is to place Mabel’s “madness” in context by contrasting it with Nick’s, which is also frightening to witness but considered more socially acceptable, steeped as it is in a masculine anxiety for domestic stability. Nick has the support of friends and family, even as he continually pushes it away; Mabel, in comparison, is isolated and alone.
Woman culminates in a stunning “coming home” sequence, which takes up the final fifty minutes of the film. Now Nick and Mabel sit together at the head of the dinner table, surrounded by an uneasy gathering of people buckling under the weight of strained normalcy. Mabel is “trying very hard not to get excited.” Nick upbraids her to “be yourself.” It ends in a precarious stalemate as the couple clears up the latest mess they’ve made.
In these final moments, A Woman Under the Influence brings us back to the question of winning and losing. Wars are fought for complex reasons, and Mabel and Nick are no different. She’s survived this skirmish. For Cassavetes, cinema’s begrudging optimist, that counts as victory.
“A Woman Under the Influence” is streaming on the Criterion Channel and Max.
