A Woman Under the Influence

A Woman Under the Influence—of what? Gena Rowlands mentions morphine once, but isn’t it in jest? I assume she’s meant to be under the influence of normal, lower-middle-class life, circa 1974, but she’s really just inflicted with diva disease. John Cassavetes’s filmmaking style was direction-without-direction, by which I think he meant to attain a deeper truth than that depicted in more conventional movies. But this film, regarded as a classic, is one of the most uncomfortable movies I’ve ever sat through. Rowlands doesn’t seem like she’s crazy, she seems like she’s acting crazy—she’s so bye-bye-birdy you want to laugh, but the serious undercurrents make you feel too queasy to do so. Mental illness doesn’t always have an apparent cause, but her campy overacting does—Cassavetes’s lax technique releases the drama queen within her like a lion into a shopping mall, and she chews the scenery like raw hunks of meat. She glowers and scrunches her face like Amy Sedaris in Strangers with Candy. As her husband, Peter Falk isn’t much better. When he blows his short fuse he’s a wild stereotype of loudmouth-goombah fury. He seems no saner than she does, and I can’t tell if that’s the point. When he tries to calm her down and have her be herself, he’s as effective as that succession of slappers who coax the frightened woman in Airplane!

There are some scenes that do feel right—quieter, looser scenes like Rowlands’s homecoming (at least in its first few minutes), and the film’s last few minutes, which aren’t all so quiet, but yet stand out as beautifully composed realism, even in terms of Rowlands and Falk’s acting. It’s as if they’ve used up their juice and were so exhausted from acting crazy that they called it quits; the movie’s over and they can be real people again, and we can sense their feeling of release. (The only real false note is in the chiruppy cooing of their forgiving children.) There’s at least one sustainedly good performance: Cassavetes’s Greek mother Katherine is wonderful as Falk’s Italian mother Margaret (although how many first- or second-generation Italian women are named Margaret?). She speaks like a variation of Ruth Gordon’s batty oldster in Rosemary’s Baby, but you can sense the stability in her nippiness that Rowlands’s nuttiness lacks.

The movie earns brownie points from me for its intentions, for which it’s probably also earned its reputation as a verité masterpiece. But good intentions and healthy experimentation can sometimes result in bad ideas and blah moviemaking. I doubt the actors were intending to play the farce that they do. But, when making movies with such serious intentions, actors’ instincts can veer toward the grandiose; and if the director thinks he’s just an observer capturing real life unfold, and doesn’t tell the cast to tone down when it should, then he’s letting stage-trained thespians turn his ultra-realism into a theater of the absurd.