A Woman Under the Influence

“Tell me what you want me to… how you want me to be…? I can be anything.” Mabel Longhetti

A Woman Under the Influence takes place over the span of a couple of days, with a lengthy coda that takes place months later, after eccentric housewife and mom Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands) has been released from the hospital where she’s been committed by her husband, Nick (Peter Falk). Few screenwriters (and John Cassavetes was always a writer-director) are so impatient with plot; he rarely connects the dots, doesn’t want to explain the roots of Mabel’s condition or how it has manifested in the past, though we may come away with a sense of the answers. Raw emotional connection is both its guiding structural principle and the theme. Time and again he omits those beats that usually structure narrative development and throws us into the middle – often, the muddle – of the character’s lives. It’s a technique that effectively removes the artificial filters of generic narrative cinema. Instead, Cassavetes grasped the excitement of “real time”, the way that long, unbroken scenes can generate multiple, complex and contradictory meanings simply through observing two or more people occupying the same space.

Gena Rowlands is extraordinary – it’s one of the most devastating performances in all cinema – as Mabel. Her innate nuttiness is pushed remorselessly into a full-blown breakdown by the man who professes to love her best: her husband Nick (Peter Falk), who finally can’t face the embarrassment of having her around. The climax is an unforgettably painful and compassionate trial of love.

Every great screen performance expands the medium in its own way, giving audiences something to respond to, while offering fresh ideas to future actors. A select few can be said to have redefined the craft entirely: Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, Toshiro Mifune in Rashomon and Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence.

Peter Debruge, Variety

The primal violence that binds men and woman has rarely been evoked as plausibly or intensely.

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

One of the best films of its decade… it’s one of those extremely rare movies that seem found rather than made, in which the internal dynamics of the drama are completely allowed to dictate the shape and structure of the film.

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader