A Woman Under the Influence

A Woman Under the Influence ★★★★★

"Mabel's not crazy—she's unusual, so don't say she's crazy!"

Hooray dear readers—today's entry marks my darling's 2,000th film as well as my 300th review, so we decided to watch something light and celebratory…of course I'm fooling; for the grand occasion cuckoo chose John Cassavetes' piercing 1974 ode to codependency A Woman Under the Influence.

With a grueling degree of closeness and artlessness, the film recounts the disturbing goings-on in the unstable lower-middle class household of Mabel (Gena Rowlands) & Nick (Peter Falk), two struggling parents undergoing severe psychological distress within their generally affectionate yet often inflammatory marriage. Though both are clearly mentally ill, it is only the more demonstrative Mabel who appears to have a clinical history. Their desperately intimate bond may be strained to its breaking point when Nick dragoons Mabel into involuntary psychiatric care following an explosive, improvised children's party.

I strive to welcome the opinions of anyone who considers a film thoughtfully, and though A Woman Under the Influence has long been a favorite of mine, I am not touchy about seeing it criticized. After all, it is a frenzied and unsightly film that deals with extremely dire fare in a highly ambiguous manner, and I can easily concede that it's not for everyone. I must take a measure of exception, however, at disapproving views formulated on the basis that the film's central domestic unit is sensationalized beyond the point of plausibility.

Now I'm fully aware that my brand—as though I can even claim one—is to provide unavailing if diverting bits of production history, bad-faith recapitulations of plot elements I don't like, and a smattering of paper-thin analysis all couched in recondite verbiage. But I feel such a particular connection to this film that I must request some leeway with regard to the regurgitation of my own personal history.

My parents divorced before I developed powers of recall, and as such I was accustomed from the beginning of my conscious life to existing in two discrete home lives. Throughout the week my brother Michael and I stayed with our mother, Susan, who worked third shift as a psych nurse. There we experienced an essentially steady if largely unattended upbringing as obstreperous latchkey kids. On weekends, however, we shuttled across the river to our father's apartment. It brings me no pleasure to attempt the following character sketch of my father George (which I provide for the sake of comparison); after all he is now dead, and some portion of his maladaptive behavior surely had its roots in mental illness and suppressed childhood trauma. The fact remains that throughout my early childhood he was a heavy drinker and was often physically and emotionally abusive. Fearing erratic shifts in his disposition, Michael and I learned from an early age how to mitigate potential crises by enabling him. The situation became more precarious when my father—who had by this point become a somewhat prickly dry drunk and would periodically cycle on and off his advised lithium regimen—initiated a highly unethical relationship with a patient named Michelle from the psychiatric hospital where he worked as a technician. This tender but distinctly unbalanced woman had repeatedly attempted suicide, subsisted entirely on meager disability benefits and furtively visited a handful of doctors from which she regularly procured a massive bevy of prescription drugs. At the time, I was too young to comprehend the nature of this enterprise or even which meds she preferred—though I formed a vague impression because my father would often call her a junkie during verbal disputes, which were not uncommon. Less typical but exceptionally memorable were eruptions of terrifying physical violence between the two of them, followed by an invariable routine. When my father would leave for work after such episodes, a bruised and chain-smoking Michelle would desperately confide their adult conflicts to me, namely his tendency to be pathologically controlling, disagreeable and finally abusive—at which point I would beg her just as desperately to leave him for her own good. Sometimes she would leave for weeks at a time, either to live (dysfunctionally) with her mother or to undergo voluntary in-patient psychiatric care, but to my dismay she would inevitably return for more punishment. This leads me to the crux of this rather humiliating trip down memory lane: despite this madness they were often very happy together—by her account she stayed because she loved him and felt loved by him. I cannot claim to understand these feelings, but I can attest to their reality because I bore witness to the slow-motion car crash of their decade-long relationship.

This is all to say I feel remarkably seen by A Woman Under the Influence. No other work that I've encountered probes with such ruthless honesty into the dark side of domestic intimacy without resorting to a condescendingly Manichaean outlook, excepting perhaps the finest moments of Raymond Carver's fiction. No plaudits can do justice to Rowlands' performance, which rests among the few that truly distinguish the medium of film.

Additional points for the show-stopping supporting turn by the director's mother, Katherine Cassavetes.

Some stray notes:
-WITH MY WIFE, YOU MORON
-I DON'T WANT YOU GETTING CHICKENSHIT AND NOT CALLING ME
-SUPPOSED TO BE A LOVE NIGHT
-BOY, YOU WERE THIRSTY
-WHAT IS IT WHEN THERE'S A LOT OF KIDS—IS THAT IN THE AIR?
-THIS IS WHAT I CALL A REALLY HANDSOME FACE
-I DON'T MIND YOU BEING LUNATIC, MABEL
-THERE IT IS—SOLID FLAB
-COME AND DIE FOR MR. JENSEN
-NOBODY HERE NEEDS A DOCTOR
-GET BACK TO YOUR COFFIN
-RELAX AND COME BACK TO ME!
-NOBODY GETS PNEUMONIA WHEN I'M THE FATHER
-I'M JUST TRYING VERY HARD NOT TO BE EXCITED
-I'M NOT A SPAGHETTI MAN
-JUST BE YOURSELF
-LET'S HAVE A LITTLE WARMTH HERE!
-DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE ASSES
-THAT'S THE END OF THE JOKES!

In my Top 100 list.

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