A Woman Under the Influence dvd movie.|
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List Price: $24.98 Features • Closed-captioned • Color • Full Screen • NTSC In Theaters : 18 November, 1974 DVD Release : 24 March, 1998 |
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A Woman Under the Influence description John Cassavetes's long, free-form drama is best appreciated as a good showcase for Gena Rowlands, playing a woman whose sanity literally appears to be shattering as different aspects of her personality eclipse others at various times. Peter Falk plays her struggling, blue-collar husband, trying to understand the phenomenon and sometimes losing his patience. As with most of Cassavetes's works as a director, one can't help but find one's attention drifting in and out (especially at two and a half hours), but Rowland's performance is a key reason the film has been declared a "national treasure" by the Library of Congress. --Tom Keogh |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Has Cassavetes ever watched a Cassavetes film? |
| Mabel is suffering a mental breakdown. This movie follows her disturbance, her family dealing with it, and her subsequent return in order to show an unconventional and more true-to-life account of mental image. A lot of it is claustrophobic and irritating, but it's one of those movies of which one can't deny its powers.
Now I appreciate Cassavetes' approach to cinema, but I just can't like it, since a large part of it seems directly produced to be completely unlikeable. This movie clocks in to about two and a half hours, a long feature even for a typical film, but as it's mostly long scenes of uncomfortable reactions, it gets a little hard to take at points. And near the end, when the husband guy is shouting, "God I could kill you, I'm going to kill you!" I believe others could stand with me when I say that every bone in my body wished he would kill someone or someone would die just so that some form of change, closure, or denouement could occur. No such luck, but that's the point, isn't it? I like Faces a lot better, but this one I think is a lot more remarkably structured. It seems almost as if it doesn't have a particular reason to end, just ending whenever, but the fact that it's split into very long, distinctive scenes (something like five or six of them) helps to realize that this film works a lot in real-time, showing domestic issues that tragically go on just about as long as we spend watching them... longer, actually, but please, let's not encourage him! Let's face it. There is NO entertainment value in it, there is little compelling about it, and it's about as nice to watch as sticking pins in your eyes... and yet, it's still a good movie. I just can't help but wonder if Cassavetes has ever watched one of his own films. --PolarisDiB |
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