Husbands is a survey of the male midlife crisis as depicted by three friends who abandon home, country,
responsibility, civility, and sanity when confronted with their own mortalities in the wake of a beloved friend’s death.

It cannot be overstated how alienating this experience was for me, a woman. Seeing John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk traipse about New York City and London in madcap fashion on the hunt for booze and cooze wasn’t exactly an unfamiliar antic in the tropes of film (or in the lives of ordinary people), but it was the potency of their iniquities that induced in me at turns woeful embarrassment, anxious alarm, putrid disgust, rankled confusion, tearful shame, and vacant hollowness. They show…

"Well I'm not going home; I'm going to get very drunk."

Methinks the title for John Cassavetes' fifth feature Husbands might be a little ironic. The private world of three married professional men (played by Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Cassavetes) is suddenly destabilized by the death of a fourth friend, intimated to be the linchpin of their tight social circle. The remaining trio appear deeply stung by the superficial vacuity of the funeral service, though one may reasonably assume that their collective pique actually has more to do with the precipitous intrusion of mortality upon the psyches of these trim, middle-class suburbanites. Enmeshed between unprocessed grief and unexamined codes of atavistic masculinity, the bereaved husbands impulsively decide that a…

"Besides sex, I like you guys better" - Harry,

Guys are a mess.

Husbands is a film about 3 men who leave their families and realize freedom isn't as fulfilling as they expected it to be. It's an amazing film that I had problems with because I couldn't get past the characters. What John Cassavetes produces and gets out of Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk is some of the most real and impactful group acting I've ever seen in a film. The cinematography is beautiful and the camera work is fantastic. I liked the pacing for the most part although the ending feels a bit long (perhaps because the ending is so cringy). I like the film, I just didn't…

Feels less like a film and more like a sociological examination of male relationships - the relationships men have with women, the relationships men have with each other, and the relationships that men have with themself. These men are fundamentally unable to sincerely communicate grief to each other, unable to sincerely communicate their guilt and sadness, they can barely understand the world around them - not even their wives and families - because of how deeply they understand each other. They’ve created their own language of communicating with each other - through joking, through drinking, through aggression - but rarely if ever through genuine expression.

The scenes in the hotel room, in which each of the men is paired off…

"What's he gonna do without us? What's he gonna go without us?"

Three narcissistic assholes throw themselves into a drunken stupor and wander around New York and London in order to treat their mourning of a close friend's death.

Cassavettes is no stranger to meandering, plotless films, but this one completely strips itself of traditional storytelling in favor of a completely aimless dissection of masculine ego, alienation, dissatisfaction. It often feels entirely improvised, yet it's clear that there's a meticulous scripting that utilizes the three men's platonic chemistry to its most useful. Gazzara, Falk, and Cassavettes are fantastic (and fantastically contemptible) with their nuanced expression of emotional depth.

This film lingers, and while it's one of Cassavettes's most difficult, it's…

"What are you feeling? What are we supposed to be feeling? Because what I'm feeling... I don't know what I'm feeling!"

I found Husbands a lot harder to sit through this second time; I think it might be that this rewatch has come so soon after a rewatch of Mikey and Nicky. Falk and Cassavetes basically play the same men in both movies, but Elaine May digs more into the specificities of their characters, whereas Cassavetes treats his as a sort of amorphous blob of morose, mid-life crisis-having masculinity. This go round, May's approach struck me as a lot more interesting - and it's forty minutes shorter.

Obviously there's still a lot of great stuff in here: the singing contest…