Romancefest 2021: A Woman Under the Influence

Written and Directed by John Cassavetes

Starring Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk

USA, 1974

Seems like I've been turning in my film buff card a lot lately. Here's a terrible admission: up until this month I'd never seen a John Cassavetes film. I am familiar with his career, his movies, his influence on cinema (and the indie scene specifically), but I never watched one from beginning to end until now. Better late than never, I guess.

This is the tale of a housewife and mother whose mental state is slowly unraveling and her construction worker husband who isn't equipped to handle it. The housewife has strange ticks, appears constantly nervous and incessantly makes hollow small talk, all seemingly out of a crippling desperation to fit in and seem normal, to appear as if she knows what she's doing, to cover up whatever's going on in her head. Unfortunately, it just broadcasts that there's something off.

This eventually escalates until she's committed, and the 2nd half of the film deals with her homecoming after she is released, and the aftermath of that.

An unspoken aspect of the movie is that at times, the husband/father seems just as "crazy" as his wife, displaying bad judgment and unable to hold back emotional outbursts, going through the motions of being a father without putting feeling behind it. But, he doesn't have to go to an insane asylum. Only she does. Sexism, everybody!

This is the part where I say Gena Rowlands in the lead performance is amazing. But, that's the single most well known thing about both this movie and Gena Rowlands. It is hard to stress just how amazing she is, though. You have to see it to believe it. The performance is so great that it makes you feel uncomfortable and I wouldn't be surprised if some people simply can't make it through the movie and have to look away. It's almost like you're there, spending time with her, captive in that house, unsure of how to react as she does her thing. It really puts you, as a viewer, on the spot and implicates you in the action.

Although the movie, to its credit, never really tells us what to think, it does show us several sides of this relationship, so we can understand what the couple sees in each other even as we suffer through their fights and episodes. You're able to see both sides, sympathetic to why Rowlands' character is acting the way she is and also able to view her from the point of view of her husband or guests in their home, wondering what's wrong with her. This is a personal, non judgmental view of the way mental problems effect relationships, both positively and negatively, and it's a shame the stigma around that is still strong enough that we haven't had many more movies like this in the last half century.