A Woman Under the Influence

Last year actress Gena Rowlands was awarded an honorary Oscar (rocking the double sunglasses look) and I was placed in the embarrassing position of not knowing very much about her career. I mean, I'd seen her performance in A Child is Waiting (1963) but in all fairness, I paid more attention to Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster, and the cast of  developmentally challenged children. I thought she was brilliant as the icy academic, Marion, in Woody Allen's 1988 drama, Another Woman. But I knew I was missing the one film that everyone said was must-see-viewing for Rowlands' acting bravura. So I remedied my film ignorance and added A Woman Under the Influence (1974) to my Netflix queue. It's nice when I make such good film decisions.

Rowlands is Mabel Longhetti, a wife and mother of three who in the opening scene appears to be a little- well, harried. Scrambling to get her children into the car with her mother and unable to keep her sandals on, she dithers and worries until her mother drives off, leaving her to a date night with her husband, Nick (the beloved, cock-eyed Peter Falk.) Only Nick has to work late and we begin to see that keeping her sandals on is the least of Mabel's issues. Her grasp of reality is as tenuous as her footwear, and soon she is tottering on the edge of proper behavior- ultimately falling into a bar and a man. 

What Rowlands does so perfectly in this film (and Rowlands' husband John Cassavetes with his script) is create the greyness of insanity.

It's hard to confirm that Rowlands is shitbird crazy. She's an over-worked mother, she's verbally and physically abused by her husband, she is reaching out like a child for love. What's so crazy about that? Her episodes multiply until a ten-minute scene where the wheels come flying off her shaky wagon. It is the most affecting view of a mental breakdown I've ever witnessed on screen. It is terrifying and painful to watch as Rowlands falls apart in front of us- unable to hold it together for one more moment.

Woman is a character piece- the kind that flourished in the late Sixties and Seventies. Cassavetes was a master of the American New Wave and this film reaches out and grabs us because of its intense and personal emotionality rather than plot twists and definitive Hollywood endings. The shots are frequently blocked by set pieces or characters and often the action and the speakers aren't even in frame. The setting is the working class- a poor family where the three kids share one bedroom and the parents sleep on a pull-out couch in the dining room. The actors seem to be improvising (Cassavetes and the actors in interviews assure us they were not) giving the feeling that we are sitting at the dinner table with them. It is textbook American verite depicting a woman going crazy.

But Cassavetes insists she is not crazy. For him this film is an indictment of the American society that forces women to be good wives and mothers and follow cultural norms that perhaps they don't naturally cotton to. That kind of pressure from family, neighbors, and your television is enough to make any woman lose it. There is a handmade sign on the bathroom/kitchen door (we assume made by Mabel) that says, "PRIVATE." This film made the private lives- and discontent of women public. And the Women's Movement of the era embraced the film for that reason.

Rowlands was nominated for Best Actress but lost to Ellen Burstyn for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore- perhaps a more comfortable portrayal of the "new woman." Another loser that year was Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, playing another iconic female nutter. But of these three memorable performances, there is a more complex, emotional truth in Rowlands that in hindsight, makes me feel like she should have gotten the Oscar. Cassavetes was also nommed for best director- but he was up against Francis Ford Coppolla for Godfather II  which hauled off six statuettes. You can't fight the Coreleones, folks.

So Gena, I'm glad you have your honorary Oscar. I think you earned it in 1974.