Husbands is
perhaps Cassavetes’ most darkly disorienting work, and probably his most
aggressive one: its trio of protagonists interrogates and/or attacks
virtually every utterance, every assumption, every active moment and every
quiet one, exhausting each other (and possibly us) in their search for a new
stable structure – the old structure fell apart after a fourth friend suddenly
died. After Harry (Ben Gazzara) gets into a violent fight with his wife, he
decides to take off for London – Gus (Cassavetes) and Archie (Peter Falk) tag
along; they all set out to find women for the night, and all succeed (the
inevitability of this, at least, is one thing the film never questions), but it
never feels like conventional coupling will generate much of an answer to
anything. The film sees better prospects for renewal within the dynamics of
mysteriously-assembled groups, often from using song as a tool for moving past
language, to a purer expression of emotion. As with most of Cassavetes’ work,
the impact is hardly naturalistic, and doesn’t necessarily seem like an
excavation of “truth” either, but it’s an astounding exercise in unbound
performance, in traumatic destabilization. And you constantly feel Cassavetes’ delight
in faces and voices and expressions, particularly it seems in observing English
women with their strange accents and turns of phrase. Harry stays in London
(defined here solely by its cramped interiors and its rain); Gus and Archie
return, if only because they can’t figure out how to make a case for doing
anything else. “What’s he going to do without us?” they ask, but the real
question is the opposite one – how they’re meant to reconfigure their
relationship yet again to accommodate a further loss. But whether they manage
it or not, the final moments of Gus returning to his family (played by Cassavetes’
real-life children) leave little doubt that they’ll be husbands, and fathers,
whether or not they’re also living out their concept of being men.
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