A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

QFS No. 145 - The invitation for June 19, 2024
We haven’t yet selected a John Cassavetes film here at Quarantine Film Society and this shortcoming has sent shockwaves throughout the organization.* What’s just as shocking is that I, your humble narrator, have never seen a Cassavetes film. In 2013, The New Yorker, wrote that Cassavetes “may be the most influential American director of the last half century.” The last half century, mind you, included the likes of Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and a lot more! So this is a pretty bold claim. And even more shameful I haven’t seen a Cassavetes film yet.

Oh sure, I’ve seen Mr. Cassavetes as an actor in such films as Rosemary’s Baby (1968). And his auteurist spirit lives on in John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch and especially Scorsese. So I feel as if I have witnessed his influence, if not having seen any of his actual work as a director itself.

I write all this just to make myself feel better because I know, I know, I should’ve been familiar with Cassavetes’ work from the second I stepped foot onto the American Film Institute campus lo those many years ago. His Faces (1968) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) have been on my list for a while, just as this week’s selection has.

A Woman Under the Influence is considered Cassavetes’ most beloved work and stars his wife Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk (as not Columbo). I’m eager to finally watch one of the true fathers of modern cinema, especially modern cinematic performance and independent filmmaking, to fill in a gaping hole in my film knowledge. 

Join us to discuss A Woman Under the Influence! Feel free to be under the influence of something as well – it’s summer, after all!

* The QFS staffer responsible for this oversight has relinquished their proper name and has been remanded to a farm upstate.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974) Directed by John Cassavetes

Reactions and Analyses:
A Woman Under the Influence (1974) offers no answers. Is it about addition? Is it about toxic relationships? Is it about mental illness? Is it about double standards between how men are treated versus how women are treated? Is it none of these or all of these?

Director John Cassavetes does not seem to be raising awareness about addiction or mental illness or any of the other aspects listed above. If anything, A Woman Under the Influence is a portrait of a relationship between two dysfunctional people. Neither change, neither seem to learn or grow. One doesn’t know how to communicate with the other and one may not be capable of behaving in the world as a functional adult. From a storytelling perspective, the movie fights against all filmmaking convention, where scenes seem to continue on past their natural end, creating a feeling of uneasiness, that we’re watching something we shouldn’t watch but we are not released from having to watch.

This scene halfway through A Woman Under the Influence (1974) continues on for a longer time than it seems like it ought. John Cassavetes gives you no way out, just as the characters are trapped in their circumstances.

In a word, the film is relentless. There’s no escape from these two and their manias. Everyone in the QFS group felt that way – the exhaustion, the cringe-inducing awkwardness, the uneasy witnessing of a dysfunctional marriage. Cassavetes traps you in this film in the way that the characters are trapped. In that way, it’s truly a remarkable achievement of filmmaking.

One of the members of the group brought up the ending, which I agree is pretty perfect and apt for the story. In fact, the entire final sequence contains the rest of the film in a nutshell. Nick (Peter Falk) has slapped Mabel (Gena Rowlands) for standing and singing on the couch, and the children are trying to protect her and refuse to stay in their rooms after he physically carries them upstairs (twice!). He has just shouted at them all, saying he’s going to murder her and their kids. It’s terribly upsetting and wrenching, especially since Mabel may just attempted suicide but instead cut her hand and now lies there bleeding slowly from the wound. Everyone, then, calms and Mabel gathers herself and tenderly puts the kids to bed.

Nick washes Mabel’s hand with equal tenderness – a man who had just hit her moments earlier and threatened mass homicide – and they’re both silent as the water cleans her hand. The Mabel talks in low tones and asks if he loves her. Nick can’t answer. He looks up at her a couple of times and back down at the bandage and the wound. And he seems like he wants to say something, but he can’t - or won’t. This is someone who has professed or at least demonstrated that he does care for her deeply. But he’s also someone who has hit her several times in the film. This moment contains so much without saying anything – which is what he does. He says nothing. It offers no answers.

Nick (Peter Falk) is unable to answer Mabel at the end when she asks him if he loves her.

But perhaps the most brilliant part of this sequence is the next and final one of A Woman Under the Influence. As the music plays, both clean up the living room and put everything back the way it was. Not fixing anything, just rearranging as if it’s all back to normal. This also speaks volumes – nothing has changed. They’re going to continue on in the same manner as when they began the film and presumably the cycle will continue.

The story unspools. We’re dropped into this family and watch what they’re experiencing as if we’re a part of it but we gather information as it goes along that changes our perspective. At first, Nick seems to tell co-workers that his wife is loving and takes care of all the household needs. He tries to get his fellow workers the night off but instead they end up having to fix a water main and he can’t spend the night with Mabel. She, for her part, has given the kids to her mother so Mabel and Nick can have a night together.

So for the first 10 minutes or so of the film, it feels like a happy, healthy family with support and a couple who are hoping to spend more time together. But then Mabel drinks heavily, goes to the bar on her own, picks up a man, brings him home, and (we think) they sleep together. So at first it appears that Mabel has a drinking problem brought on by loneliness because her husband works so much.

A typical setup and familiar story. But then, when Mabel wakes up and the man (Garson Cross played by George Dunn) tries to slink away in the early morning, Mabel calls him by her husband’s name and is confused where the children are. We had seen her just the afternoon before as she put the kids in her mother’s car. Her behavior is jarring, and we start to realize that Mabel’s problems aren’t only substance-related – she has some form of mental illness.

For Nick’s part, at first he seems like a garrulous but likeable middle-class working man, doing his best to live with a woman who suffers from mental illness and doesn’t know what to do. He expresses regret on the phone that he has to stay out late working, and we’re led to believe this is a reasonable caring man – until we seem him shouting at Mabel in front of his co-workers at dinner the next day. (Setting aside for a moment how unusual it is for Nick to have invited a dozen guys from work over to dinner after being gone for probably 40 hours straight and missing a night with his wife...) Throughout that dinner scene, Mabel is so hard to watch – smiling and enjoying, but clearly not all there. So then when she insists on someone dancing with her and Nick shouts in front of everyone, we feel as if we’re in that dinner and can feel that awkwardness the others feel.

Nick seems caring at the beginning, and he mostly is. But also prone to unreasonable overreactions and violence. Or has he been driven to that?

Mable (Gena Rowlands) in the Top 10 most awkward dinner scenes of all time.

Because she starts caressing this pretty face and insists on dancing, leading to Nick;s first outburst.

At this point, it seems as though Mabel has a clear mental problem. But with Nick, we start to get close. Is he abusing her and that’s what’s driven her to this point? Or is it Nick driven to this rage because he’s lived with a person with mental illness and has no tools to address it in a time where these conditions were even more stigmatized than they are now 50 years later? Soon, we do see Nick strike Mabel so we know he’s capable violence as well. This unspooling continues as we learn more and more – the introduction of the doctor who knows her condition, Nick’s mother, Mabel’s mother and later her father. It’s clear this has been going on for some time and we’re just catching up.

One question that came up in the discussion is – does Nick have a mental illness as well? He seems prone to outbursts and violence, mood swings of his own. He wants to control everything, show everyone that everything is normal. Take the scene at the beach with the kids. He insists they go to the beach but then Nick chases down his daughter even though all she was trying to do was going to work on the sand castle. He preferred her be over by him on a beach towel, I guess?

Nick is also prone to extreme overreacting. He comes home when Mabel has been “babysitting” her three kids and two friends. Nick arrives and the kids are all trying on clothes in a costume party and their daughter is running around naked, as kids sometimes do. He flies off the handle, threatens to kill the other kids and their father, Harold (Mario Gallo) in what can only be described as an unnecessary escalation. 

To me, it seems clear that Nick also has a mental condition of some kind. Others weren’t so sure, they felt he was perhaps behaving in a way that someone might behave living with a loved one who has manic mood swings the way Mabel does (not that they condoned the violence of course). Whatever it is – perhaps some combination of both mental illness and driven to the edge (again, Cassavetes provides no answers) – it’s clear that the combination of Mabel and Nick is combustible. They go up in flames.

It says volumes that Nick can get off by behaving the way he does without so much as a mention of him having a problem that needs to be addressed, but it’s Mabel who gets carted off to an institution for six months. She’s subjected to shock therapy and separation from her children, but no one tells Nick that he’s got to seek counseling for rage or domestic abuse as well. He definitely definitely needs it. But it’s 1974, he’s a working class male in America, there is likely no way it’s even on his radar – or on anyone else’s in the family – that he has problems that need to be addressed.

Everything’s fine. We’re all fine here. So she’s got a couple of screws lose and is in the nuthouse, so what? (Paraphrasing Nick

Instead, he’s free to take his young kids out of school, ride in the back of a pickup truck with them, give them Hamm’s beer until they’re drunk enough to sleep as soon as they get home. It’s both a product of the 1970s and also the double standard of how the “hysterical” woman is treated versus how a man is, as reckless as his behavior may be.

Nick tries to get convince everyone, and maybe himself, that you can just force yourself to act normal and things will be normal. He plans a large, ill-conceived party for Mabel’s return from the institution. He invites all of the guys over for dinner after the work shift. He shouts at Mabel to just flip the switch and act normal. But that’s not how it works, and nobody in the film knows how to deal with Mabel’s problems – least of all the family doctor (Eddie Shaw). Dr Zepp communicates with Mabel in a way that we would, in 2024, recognize as profoundly unhelpful. Telling a manic mental health patient to simply “calm down” or the like is definitely not at all useful in any way.

Great sequence that is pure 1970s - a smoking Peter Falk riding in the back of a pickup with children who’ve been taking big swigs of Hamm’s beer.

A Woman Under the Influence is not easy – not to watch and also not easy to discern what meaning to derive from it, if any. And yet, it does feel like essential viewing. There are scenes where the filmmaking is top tier. When Nick’s drinking with the children (that’s so strange to write…), it’s a very tight closeup on Nick as the frame bounces violently, but solidly holding the closeup on Nick. The world speeds past him, out of focus and in a blur behind his head and the red railing of the truck. And he speaks very earnestly with the kids, apologizing for having to send their mother into the institution. The contrast between the dynamic background and what he’s saying is incredibly effective and affecting, giving the feel of that’s what his life feels like.

Mabel returns home after her time at the institution and goes to see their children.

When she sees them, it’s played in tight disorienting closeups, evoking how Mabel feels.

Also, when Mabel comes back home, she finally gets to see the children. She steps into the adjacent room and it cuts to a close up on her face. All of the shots are tight – there is no wide shot that holds the room and the family. It’s tight on her, then tight on the kids, it’s a little disorienting and you can’t quite get your bearings. This is how Mabel feels, and it’s done with the camera, without any gimmicks or special effects. Just simple shot selection, cinematography, choice of camera, and performance. Basically – directing. Cassavetes pushed his performers to the brink to expose their raw insides, photographed that rawness, and made a wrenching, relentless film.

In A Woman Under the Influence, he pushes his audience the same way, giving them no way out. Just as the characters in the film are trapped by their circumstances and each other. Is the moving saying anything about that? Is it saying nothing about that? I still don’t know for sure. So if if for nothing else, the movie is worth enduring exactly because it offers no easy answers in the way that life often does not.