Empathy comes in the moments of quiet nuance. John Cassavetes captures compassion so bravely with his camera. It’s a lost art at the movies, letting things linger, centering on a boiling tea kettle and leaving it whistling without taking it off of the stove. Not everything that happens in a plot must have a conclusion and an answer. That’s not how life works. Some threads in life are frayed at the end. Even our most ambitious affairs in life and love sometimes come to dead ends. There is not always a carrot on a stick and when there is, the carrot is not always ours to have. Sometimes we are just living in the truth of chaos theory — life comes at us fast and on its own terms. How we show up for each other and for ourselves and what we do to react is what matters.
In A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes directs a relationship under pressure, starring his wife Gena Rowlands as Mabel and his best friend in collaboration Peter Falk as Nick. The uncompromising beauty of the film is in Nick’s flawed but faithful deep devotion to Mabel. As she crashes out in spiritual decline from addiction and behavior health challenges, Nick’s love for her is built out of empathetic understanding.
A love story in film does not have to be all roses and chocolate heart boxes. This film, as tortured as its characters are, is a much deeper reflection of a true and realistic love than any otherwise amorous and facile romance on screen. Because it is pure. Because it is lived-in, with years of subtext baked into the characters and their lives together. It’s a lovely thing. Mostly.
Mostly because it is one-sided. They say an unrequited love is the best of all, but what about love built on the bedrock of true understanding? A love that doesn’t always give back but is so holistically designated, that the expression itself is the giving back? Isn’t that the best love of all?
That said, the love in A Woman Under the Influence is also problematic. As the tagline goes: A woman of today, her world, her passions, which tells us something too, it’s baked into the relationship realities of 1974, when the film was made, and we may want to raise the flag on some contemporary issues and problematic triggers. There is abuse in the film. First, Mabel is doing a kind of self-harm. Drinking from pain, initially being taken advantage of by another man who uses her distorted perception of reality against her, then being yelled at and physically accosted by Nick later on. We do not need to excuse these acts for any party, they simply reflect the grave reality of the situation for the characters.
It starts off with Nick’s mom coming for the three kids. There’s so much preestablished character study built into this, as Mabel briskly and rudely moves the children from the house into Ma’s car. Then Nick goes to work and it ends up being a double-shift, a long two days spent away doing physical labor while Mabel disintegrates while left alone.
There is a gorgeous aptitude of confidence constructed here. It’s in the quiet moments. It’s Mabel with her feet kicked up on the table, emptied beer cans scattered around, working on another drink. Nick calls with the bad news of the endless shift during what would have been their alone time and she melts, emotionally and spiritually. She goes into a drunken fugue state. Gets used by another man. Then there are all these silent moments, nothing underscoring them, a kind of purposeful minimalism, that draw reflection.
The affair is not judged, really, it’s even left unanswered for. The moral position of the film is not against Mabel, it’s in wanting her to come back to the family. The second the kids leave, she’ll immediately exclaim, what about the kids, where are the kids? She cannot maintain her wellness with or without any company, the storm in her mind will brew either way.
When Nick returns with all his blue collar cohorts, Mabel is hungover, in fact, still wasted. But in a deeply unsettling scene, her role of domesticity still must be justified to their party guests. The boys have all worked hard and she’s going to make them spaghetti.
As they sit round the table, Mabel comes unglued. She doesn’t remember dear friends of theirs. She becomes overfamiliar and lacks boundaries with others. But resting over this scene is a tension of terror. She’s caught in the spiral and everyone can see her for how she is: so deeply embattled and scarred from her own unwellness. And the movie does not save her or us: we must watch this torturous moment of indecent exposure. It feels wrong up and down the scene, as she progressively stages louder protestations to the group. Won’t the men get up and dance with her? Although Nick loses his patience with her, they also endure as lovers and partners. His actions show frustration but under it is a deep residing love that cannot waver for her.
John Cassavetes always finds the heart in his characters in this way. He lets each scene cook and will not step in front of any discomfort he means for us to feel. Grounded in this dark reality, is a love story that is caustically sad and true. The audience, like Nick, waits for the next shoe to drop, and we never have to wait long.
The resonance of A Woman Under the Influence continues to be deeply moving to this day. If we can overlook its problematic aspects, of abuse and some racism, without excusing them, we can understand the film as never blessing these actions, but always showing a raw portrait of cognitive decline and dysfunction, which is also answered always by the nature of a real and enduring love, the same love the director exudes on screen for his wife and best friend. As a capsule of devotion against the odds, A Woman Under the Influence remains a defining document of American independent cinema.