First-time viewers of John
Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, drawn by its ever-growing
reputation, may be surprised to discover that it begins with scenes of blue-collar
men at work, allotting the top-billing not to Gena Rowlands but to Peter Falk:
it’s an early indication of how the film is as much, if not more, about the “influence”
as about the woman. Rowlands’ Mabel has no job, no close friends that we’re
shown (albeit that her husband Nick is easily capable of filling up the house
for an impromptu party), no apparent interests; after working all night on what
was supposed to be a date night, he brings his crew back to the house for an
early morning group meal, which of course she’s expected to spring into action
to prepare. This all flows into the film’s abiding core mystery, how much of
Mabel’s unusual or outright “crazy” behaviour is the “fault” of society, and of
her husband in particular, a necessary release valve of sorts in a life which
would otherwise be intolerably dull and repetitive; one wonders whether she
might be demonstrating, in some sense at least, the most fully-inhabited, boundary-testing
consciousness in the whole movie. Rowlands is as remarkable as everyone says,
at once laceratingly present and comprehensively unknowable, funny and intimate
and loving and scarily possessed. The film’s home stretch, after Mabel returns
from some six months in an institution (of which, again, we see nothing), at
first seeming weary and subdued, then gradually reclaiming some version of her
old self, sums up all its worrying mysteries: is Nick helping her back toward
something true, or bullying her into being the unusual but essentially submissive
woman to which he’s accustomed? The final images of routine domesticity
reasserting itself suggest a recovered equilibrium, but few will read it as an
entirely happy ending.
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