A Woman Under the Influence

Plot synopsis:
Los Angeles housewife and mother Mabel loves her construction worker husband Nick and desperately wants to please him, but the strange mannerisms and increasingly odd behavior she displays while in the company of others has him concerned. Convinced she has become a threat to herself and others, he reluctantly commits her to an institution, where she undergoes treatment for six months.
Left alone with his three children, Nick proves to be neither wiser nor better than his wife in the way he relates to and interacts with them or accepts the role society expects him to play.
After six months Mabel returns home but she is not prepared to do so emotionally or mentally, and neither is her husband prepared correctly for her return. At first Nick invites a large group of people to the house for a party to celebrate his wife's return, but realizing at the last minute that this is foolish, he sends most of them home. Mabel then returns with mostly only close family, including her parents, Nick's parents, and their three children to greet her but even this is overwhelming and the evening disintegrates into yet another emotionally and psychologically devastating event.
Nick kicks the family out of the house, leaving husband and wife alone. After yet another psychotic episode where Mabel cuts herself, Nick decides to put the children to bed. The youngsters profess their love for their mother as she tucks them in. Nick and Mabel themselves ready their bed for the night as the film ends.

Tags: suspenseful, depressing, bleak, insanity, claustrophobic, melodrama, romantic

Review:
Gena Rowlands' portrayal of the likable but frail Mabel is nothing short of incredible, and Peter Falk gives an equally remarkable performance as Mabel's husband Nick.
This is just another confirmation that Cassavetes, along with Dreyer and Tarkovsky, is one of the very small number of geniuses in film, whose every film is an extension of their genius -- some more mature than others, but impossible to be "bad"; they are beyond terms like "good" or "bad" -- they are the great art works of the century.This film isn't about a "crazy" lady; it's not about putting a woman in an institution; and it's not about people talking about your crazy wife, though all of this happens in the film.
What Cassavetes does is turn *us* into children -- it's as if we're experiencing things for the first time all over again, because it's a totally new experience, the same with watching a movie like "Andrei Rublev." That is an amazing thing to pass onto an audience.
It's not a screamy moment with a woman hiding in the bathroom; his avuncular twang is disarming.There's a complete lack of self-consciousness in the film, and I mean that in terms of the characters (during Mable's key freak out scene, Rowlands does, I think, go too far) -- that's why the kids are s terrific in the film.
She's a frenetic, guideless woman trying to do the guiding.The way Cassavetes sets up the film, with ominous piano music that comes in when Falk is trying to speak, blinded by frustration; or setting the film inside this house with gigantic rooms, makes everything feel larger and emptier at the same time.
Peter Falk is underrated as Nick, the husband who tries to deal with Mabel's condition, with such severity sometimes, that even himself can't control his own reactions.This is the set-up of the film, it's a drama, that couldn't have been directed by anyone but the great John Cassavettes.
Every look on Gena's eyes, every way she deforms her face, every noise or weird hand gesture she makes is the expression of a poor little a soul trying to communicate a part of what remains in the bottom, what remains of Mabel's personality.Confronted to Mabel's emotional clumsiness, Nick looks totally helpless, yet he's not exempt from reproaches.
If Mabel acts under Nick's influence, Nick's life and behavior are equally influenced by Mabel's problem, the effects on the couple, on the family and the relationships with the friends are disturbingly heart-breaking.Disturbing, Cassavetes' masterpiece is because it reflects our own fears with a gripping realism, it's a journey into the deepest bottom of the human soul, made of anger, fear, sadness, happiness, reason, craziness, men, women, children, human relationships.
"A Woman under the Influence"'s direction turns it into a chaotic journey into human relationships, and a very exhausting experience in reality.Gena Rowlands gave the best performance I've ever seen, and the fact she won or not an Oscar doesn't even matter ...
Director John Cassavetes follows a few months in the life of a family whose mother and wife (Gena Rowlands) is suffering from mental illness, and the movie consists of one long scene after another of her cracking up, or trying not to crack up, and the various family members' reactions to her cracking up.
The highlight of the film (or low point, depending on your point of view) comes when Rowlands's character returns home from a stay in an institution, and her family works overtime to convince themselves that everything's fine when the audience can see clearly that everything is not.Bruising is the best word I can think of to describe this film.Grade: A-.
Her performance is on par with the best study of nervous breakdown I've seen, and this is Liv Ullmann in Bergman's "Face to Face".Peter Falks was also a revelation - I love him as Lt. Columbo in the TV series but he is a completely different character here; in a way, he is as mentally unbalanced as his wife is.
Falk meanwhile is a revelation to those who know him only from Colombo - his portrayal of the inarticulate, confused, occasionally violent but still very loving Nick is perfect - he just IS this guy.Incidentally, you can see where Scorsese took many of the ideas for his most personal films from (notably "Mean Streets" which apparently he made after Cassavetes criticised "Boxcar Bertha") although he tidied them up and made them commercial.
While John Cassavetes is (rightly) revered for this film and other under his belt, wife/key-star Gena Rowlands is the most fascinating and emotionally gripping part to this work, Woman Under the Influence.
And as it happens, Falk finds some of his most daring work here as Nick, a character who in his own way has become as nuts as Mabel with the everyday grind of living (which for both of them is filled with people, talk, pure humanity).
Within its two-and-a-half hour running time, John Cassavetes touches on some of the most indescribable emotional states that human beings ever experience.Technically, the film is equally excellent, with a nice minimalist score by Bill Harwood, softly beautiful cinematography, and fascinating editing.
I have met people who are truly mentally disturbed, yet I've never seen any of them act quite like Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence.
I have met people who are truly mentally disturbed, yet I've never seen any of them act quite like Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence.
A fascinating study of mental illness, "A Woman Under the Influence" rests on two strengths - the spectacular performances by Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands, and Cassavetes's groundbreaking style of direction.
In one example of great main leads in his films, Cassavetes' real-wife Rowlands is playing Mabel, the woman of the title, the house-wife of a Peter Falk's construction foreman Nick.
Filmmaker John Cassavetes was criticized at the time for creating what some saw as a preconceived tour-de-force for actress-spouse Gena Rowlands, yet she seems to fully inhabit the neuroses of this unstable woman, giving the role enough batty flourish to cover several performances.
"A Woman Under the Influence" (1974) is a romantic drama about a marriage between Nick Longhetti, played by Peter Falk, and Mabel Longhetti, played by Gina Rowlands.
In a Los Angeles suburb, Mabel (Gena Rowlands) is a stay-at-home Mom married to Nick (Peter Falk) who works in construction and has good friendships with his colleagues.
Gena Rowlands gave one really really great performance.But it is not just Mabel and her mental illness which the film is all concerned about.
But thanks to the characterisations of Gena Rowlands (Cassavete's wife in the part of Mabel Longhetti) and Peter Falk (as her husband Nick) a rather simple story like this gets complex and multi-layered.
"A woman under the influence" is,along with "a child is waiting" and maybe "husbands" John Cassavetes's most accessible work.Accessible,but not necessary palatable for everyone.Improvisation has a large part,the spaghetti scene was probably filmed like that,that's why Cassavetes has his own actors troup:here we find Gena Rowlands(dazzling),Peter Falk(a thousand miles away from Colombo) and Cassavetes's own mother.One of the child is played by Matthew Laborteaux,who will be very popular as Albert in the "little house" series.
Rowlands plays a very normal woman,living in a rather Italian macho world,where woman has got to content herself with cooking ,gardening,and child care.But after  a problem at her husband's work,everything seems to go wrong:Mabel's games with the children seem odd to her family circle,and,one night,she sleeps with the first to come.She's gone nuts,as her family thinks.
After a psychiatric hospital stay,Mabel comes back ,a new Mabel,all smiling.She seems to have changed,but her behavior is too contrived,too polite,without the spontaneity she had before,in a nutshell,her psyche is shot.After a suicide attempt,her husband understands that the true Mabel was the one before.Will they be able to pick up the pieces?This is a very long movie (2 hours and a half)with very long scenes that might bore some.Cassavetes is closer to European mood,that's why he 's so revered here.You will be highly rewarded if you follow Mabel's rocky road in this man's man's man's world though..
While this may have been annoying in some scenes of Faces, in a work like A Woman Under the Influence it makes us become more involved in the chaos of the Longhetti family.He certainly is helped by all the cators he chooses in the film.
There are no black screens ending the scenes, the fights are long and unbearable, the uncomfortable situations that Rowland's state of mind leads to are never ended abruptly, we often stay for the whole events, stay for the beginning, the middle and the end of every single little tragedy that happens everyday.The husband shouting, the wife making strange sounds, the kids crying.
Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands), a wife and mother, is loved by her husband Nick (Peter Falk) but her madness proves to be a problem in the marriage.
A Tale of Woe. Fresh to Cassavetes' canon, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE is tiresome and exhausting for my first-time viewing, throughout the entire running time (155 minutes), we watch a series of intense clashes between Mabel (Gena Rowlands) and Nick (Peter Falk), sometimes catalyzed by their family members or close friends, and the repercussions includes Mabel exacerbates her mental disability and the collateral damage to their 3 young children.
Cassavetes constructs the whole thing as a study on the role of madness in the American family, how it buries in and makes an impact on the entire household.Rather than strictly making it a study of the psychotic Mabel, he makes an intimate point in exploring Falk's Nick, the loving and eternally trying husband.
I think a lot of scenes go on too long and there's no reason for this to be over two hours, but the eerie sensation Cassavetes is able to bring out of these extended interactions was very interesting to me.Where the film doesn't work for me and what dragged it down a lot, unfortunately, was in Rowlands' performance.
In an Oscar-nominated performance, Gena Rowlands plays Mabel Longhetti, a mentally unstable housewife married to blue-collar worker, Nick.
So authentic.The drama is almost unbearable to watch so despite the good acting I don't think I will be watching this movie again in the near future (read on IMDb that Rowlands persuaded Cassavetes not to set this up as a play as it would not have been possible to play Mabel Longhetti on a regular basis).Still.
This movie is about a mother/wife who is somewhat odd or even could be considered a little crazy and thus makes the marriage very strenuous.We get a feel for how Mabel's life works, we see her in the very beginning rushing around the house with her kids trying to get them ready to go to her mothers house for the night.
In director John Cassavete's brilliant film, "A Woman under the Influence", Gena Rowlands plays Mabel Longhetti a housewife who boarders on insanity.
The love that Mabel has for them despite her own psychiatric problems shows that the Longhetti family is a secure unit even if they don't conform to the standards of what the average mother should really act like.Nick too strives to be a good parent.
In this particular movie, the main character, Mabel Longhetti (played by Gena Rowlands - wife to the director), is mentally ill.
This movie asks the questions: "What is insanity?", "When is someone so mentally unstable that they should be institutionalized?", "Who has the authority to commit someone against their will?" These questions could be the basis for a great movie, but I found the histrionics on display here annoying and, after over two and a half hours, exhausting.The woman whose mental status is in question is Mabel (Gina Rowlands) with Nick (Peter Falk) her working-class husband.
While her husband seems to play the classic father role model, with their three kids that added a spontaneous and sincere climate to the movie.The scene where Nick brought his friends with him and Mabel asked whether they want to have spaghetti for breakfast.
the emotions shared between the children and Mabel were really the only truthful ones throughout the whole movie, that is to say children did easily interact with their mothers behavior, notwithstanding the emotion disorder that Mabel is suffering from.On the contrary, for her mother in law and her husband both of them think that she is out of her mind and started to get nutty and mad so they decided to take her to a psychiatric hospital where she will be treated.After Mabel came back from the hospital, the whole of her family gathered in order to welcome her so she will feel secure and safe again, but it was until her husband cracked up telling to go back to her old self, starting from that scene both the husband and wife showed simultaneously that the real problem is with both of them.This is my first John Cassavetes film, which as I noticed is someone who focus more on the emotional experience than the quality or the awe that can a beautiful picture make as impact on us, thus the active camera seemingly going everywhere, so if someone is interested in the film he or she has to really get into the heart of the movie otherwise it won't be that attractive, therefore it will be difficult to grasp the crux of the movie.
moreover John cassavetes loved to work with the people he already knew we can take his wife Gena Rowlands and his friend Peter Falk as examples, it means that John wanted to have that emotional fluidity which enable the movie to be more realistic and influential.Still, I can't say exactly under which influence Mabel was, sure it's an influence and nothing more because Melba still is a better parent than her husband, but I would extremely disagree with the people that naively qualify Mabel as someone crazy, out of her mind because '' This woman cooks, sews, makes the bed, washes the bathroom; what the hell is crazy about that?''..
And here Cassavetes is in 1975 saying married women were under the influence of their husbands, that Mabel is under the influence of Nick (played by Peter Falk), under his control, he's the man of the house, and he's the one who tells her what to do, how to act.
From actor and independent writer/director John Cassavetes, A Woman Under the Influence gives the viewer a look at a working class family with a problem of mental instability.
The husband, Nick (played by Peter Falk) is a blue collar worker who has trouble showing his wife, Mabel (played by Gena Rowlands) the amount of attention that she deserves.
If, as viewers, we believe that the influence affecting Mabel (the Gena Rowlands character) is alcohol or drugs than we must have watched only the first thirty minutes of the film.
The excessively domineering Peter Falk character (Mabel's husband Nick) would drive any person to acting unusually; indeed, Mabel's mental illness seems more of a result of her loving him rather than any internal mental problem.The childlike innocence of Gena Rowlands' insanity is touching if even a little overdone.
Post viewing the film A Woman Under the Influence (1974), by director John Cassavetes, I couldn't help but feel like I was the one losing my mind and falling out of reality.
Rowlands so completely commands the screen with this performance that during the 30-45 minutes when her character is not screen (when Mabel has been committed), the film comes to a screeching halt.Peter Falk is explosive in an almost Brando-esque turn as Nick, a husband who is at a loss how to help the woman he loves more than life.
Poor Mabel (Rowlands), she was at the mercy of his anger and emotionally did what she had to do to cope.But this was a different era; it was shown, through Cassavetes' writing and direction, that it was acceptable then, in some American blue-collar homes, to slap women around, threaten people, give children alcohol, as long as it was the man of the house doing it.How times have changed, and it was through movies like this, where bizarre social behavior that was on the borderline of acceptable in that era, may have been a catalyst for the audience to examine their own emotions and mores..
Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk give 2 of the best performances that I have ever seen as a mentally ill, and possibly alcoholic and morphine addict (although this is only implied), woman and her angry husband who desperately wants her to be normal, to the point of trying to force this upon her.The film starts with Mabel sending her children to her mother in law's house, expecting her husband to come home since he promised her a "love night".
Shocking, at times brutal and horrifying, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE is the kind of film anyone interested in independent cinema should watch, not just for its cinema-verite feel, but for the sheer power of Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk's acting as they literally become their roles.
The film tells of the incidences that lead her to suffer a nervous breakdown, the toll Mabel's struggles have on her husband Nick (Peter Falk) and three children, and her shaky readjustment to normal life after a 6-month stay in a mental hospital.Gena Rowlands' performance as a troubled house-wife is powerful and electrifying.
"A Woman Under the Influence" (John Cassavetes, 1974) could easily be re-titled "An Audience Under the Influence." Through the use of confining technical tricks, Cassavetes manages to have a serious affect on those who view this film, drawing them into the lives of Mabel and Nick Longhetti (Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk).