A Woman Under the Influence
John Cassavetes (1974)
At the time of its release, A Woman Under the Influence was widely assumed to be inspired by one of R D Laing’s theories of mental illness: that an individual’s seeming ‘madness’ may be a reasonable response or resistance to the pressures of their social environment – either immediate family or the larger society of which they’re a part, or both. Fifty years on, though, the title character, Los Angeles homemaker Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands), seems under the influence not of Laingian theory but of a particular film-making approach – to be trapped not in a crazy social unit but in a John Cassavetes movie. Mabel’s supposed oppressors and abusers, chiefly her husband Nick (Peter Falk) and his mother (Katherine Cassavetes), are in the same boat – dramatically claustrophobic but leaky. Late on in this protracted (146-minute) ordeal of a film, Nick Longhetti tries to calm a tense family gathering by telling everyone they should ‘just talk, you know … normal talk … conversation’. Good luck with that, Nick … in Cassavetes country, normal conversation is against the law. Wherever two or three are gathered together – and two will usually do – they’ll soon be knocking eight bells out of each other. Verbally, at least; in A Woman Under the Influence sometimes physically, too.
From the start, Mabel’s behaviour is unusual and, to most people with whom she comes into contact, alarming but it’s not easy to pin a label on, and the film avoids doing so. She’s often hyperactive, both in her chatter and in her movements and gestures. Her emotional intensity and openness are part of what makes Mabel’s children – Angelo (Matthew Laborteaux), Tony (Matthew Cassel) and Maria (Cristina Grisanti) – adore their mother. Grown-ups are much less sure, though we seem meant to conclude that Nick, despite his alarmingly aggressive tendencies, loves Mabel, too. During the film’s first hour or so, she becomes increasingly erratic. She hosts a play date for the kids and their school friends, the three Jensen children, whose father, Harold (Mario Gallo), as soon as he encounters Mabel, is reluctant to leave them in her care. Nick comes home, with his mother Margaret, to find all six children running wild, Maria completely naked, Harold Jensen trying to sort out his own kids, and Mabel more manic than anyone. Nick slaps his wife and gets into a punch-up with Harold, who then angrily exits with his children. Nick calls Zepp (Eddie Shaw), the family doctor, who tries, with difficulty, to give Mabel a sedative injection; in the course of the struggle, Nick turns on Dr Zepp, insults and threatens him, too, while Margaret Longhetti yells abuse at her daughter-in-law, telling Mabel what a terrible wife and mother she is. The long-suffering doctor eventually succeeds in injecting Mabel. Judging her a threat to herself and others, and with her husband’s consent, he has her sectioned.
Why, given his alarm on meeting Mabel, doesn’t Harold Jensen immediately take his children away? By this stage of A Woman Under the Influence (and especially if you’ve seen other Cassavetes cinema), you know the answer to that question. The Jensens hang around in order to create a scene – in more ways than one. Cassavetes films are famous for hyper-realistic acting but they’re unrealistic in terms of narrative coherence. This isn’t because the action is improvised, even though Cassavetes is committed to a performing style so apparently spontaneous that it suggests improvisation. He no doubt allowed his actors to contribute their own ideas and inventions to proceedings but he was hardly unique in that respect and his scripts were fully written beforehand. (A detailed screenplay for A Woman Under the Influence, dated 23 August 1972, is available online[1].) The incoherence seems to derive, rather, from his priority of animating characters’ behaviour without grounding it in motivation. Although it’s hard not to be aware of this whenever you watch a Cassavetes film, the effect can vary. Gloria (1980) is an obvious case apart for other reasons (Cassavetes wrote the script without ever intending to direct it); Husbands (1970) is a more useful point of comparison. It’s unconvincing that the trio of title characters leave their homes and wives in New York to cross the Atlantic but much of what goes on in London is plausible and nearly all of it absorbing. For this viewer, it also makes a difference if Cassavetes appears in front of the camera – as he does in Husbands and Love Streams (1984) – because he’s such an exciting and inventive actor to watch.
In A Woman Under the Influence, though, the repeated discrepancy between the extreme nature of much of the action and the improbability of the situation in which it occurs, wrecks the film. It starts with Mabel anxiously preparing for her children to stay overnight with her mother, Martha (Lady Rowlands); this will enable Mabel and Nick to have a ‘date night’. Nick works for the local authority as foreman of a crew maintaining and repairing essential infrastructure. He’s delayed on an emergency job and doesn’t make it home until the next morning. In the meantime, Mabel goes to a bar, picks up a man called Garson Cross (George Dunn), drinks too much and brings him home with her. When Cross makes a move on her, Mabel seems confused and upset but incapable of resisting; she and Cross spend the night together. He gets up early; when Mabel wakes, she’s still confused, enough to call him Nick, which prompts Cross to ask, ‘Who’s Nick? You’re not married, are you?’, though you’d think he’d wonder about the ring on Mabel’s wedding finger, not to mention the size of her house. In the meantime, Nick is defensively fending off cautious, well-meaning questions from his colleagues about his wife, insisting that Mabel ‘is not crazy’. Yet he arrives home along with his crew and tells Mabel to make spaghetti for them – all eleven of them – which she does. This gathering makes no sense beyond its own dynamic. It goes on and on until Mabel gets overly friendly with one of the men, Nick reprimands her and the guests depart. Mabel and Nick are in bed together when Martha brings the children back and they interrupt the delayed date night. Soon everyone is on or in the bed, including Mabel’s mother – at Nick’s insistence, which briefly and bizarrely suggests his wife’s uninhibited condition is contagious.
After Mabel is sectioned, Nick is understandably even more touchy at work. He’s angry when the other men inquire about Mabel, even angrier when his friend, Eddie (Charlie Horvath), doesn’t ask questions: Nick causes the fall that leaves Eddie seriously injured. Next, Nick picks up his kids early from school – bawling furiously at the teacher who queries this – and takes them to the beach. Then ‘Six months later’ appears on the screen: it’s the day of Mabel’s release from the mental hospital and her homecoming occupies the rest of the film. The jump forward in time relieves Cassavetes of any description of family life without Mabel. We assume the two grandmothers have helped out looking after Angelo, Tony and Maria but get no sense whatsoever of how the children have been feeling in their mother’s absence. Normal, nonsensical service is quickly resumed. Nick has invited scores of people to a welcome home party for Mabel. His mother points out this may be overwhelming for Mabel and tells Nick that everyone except close family and closest friends must be sent home: Margaret decrees this after everyone has arrived at the party, so that Cassavetes can maximise the fractious turmoil of their getting turfed out – in pouring rain.
When Mabel first arrives home, she’s unusually quiet and tentative but soon recovers her voice and capacity to say the wrong thing, loudly announcing how much weight one of her sisters-in-law has put on, etc. It doesn’t appear to occur to anyone that even this amount of company – there must still be at least a dozen guests in the house – could be tough for Mabel to deal with on her first day home; in the end, it’s Mabel herself who tells all those remaining to leave, by which point she’s standing on a sofa dancing to the theme from Swan Lake. Angelo, Tony and Maria never join the party: they’re in a separate room that Mabel enters to talk uncertainly with them. Once everyone has gone and Mabel has rushed to the bathroom to try and self-harm, Cassavetes needs the children back. Mabel cuts her hand with a razor but Nick stops her from doing worse. She jumps back on the sofa, he tells her to get down and she refuses. Nick tries to grab her, the kids try to defend their mother; when Nick whacks Mabel and she falls to the floor, they gather round in distress. Both she and Nick assure the children she is just resting. Mabel recovers to put them to bed.
Although Cassavetes himself isn’t in the cast, it will be clear from some of the names in brackets above that A Woman Under the Influence is very much a family affair in terms of the cast as well as the characters they’re playing. Cassavetes’ mother plays Nick’s mother; Gena Rowlands’ mother plays Mabel’s mother; Cassavetes’ father plays one of the Longhettis’ oldest friends. John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands had three children together, one of whom plays one of the Jensen children. (One of Nick and Mabel’s children is played by the son of Cassavetes’ long-time collaborator Seymour Cassel.) Gena Rowlands’ portrait of Mabel is deservedly famous – a display of phenomenal resource and emotional variety. Rowlands won awards for it but not the Best Actress Academy Award for which she was nominated. Plenty of admirers think this one of the biggest Oscar injustices of all time but I can understand why more voters opted for the more limited performance of Ellen Burstyn in Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore – which tells an involving story during which the protagonist develops. That’s not the case here. I felt sure I’d seen A Woman Under the Influence once before, about twenty years ago, but I could recall nothing of it: despite the many in extremis episodes, the story is thin and the film a showcase for Gena Rowlands’ brilliance rather than a character study.
Whatever Cassavetes may have meant to say about mental illness, he ended up making a maddening film. A Woman Under the Influence ends on an uncharacteristically quiet note. Once the children are in bed, Nick and Mabel start clearing up the debris from the homecoming party. Reconciled at least for the time being, they don’t talk while they’re doing this. Then Nick switches off lights and the film ends. This is one of the most effective sequences in the whole picture. At the same time, it’s a reminder that John Cassavetes’ idea of ‘truth’ in human relationships almost invariably consists of sound and fury, of how rarely it means not needing to speak.
28 June 2025
[1] At https://cinephiliabeyond.org/