Critics reviews

The subtle feminist comment Cassavetes weaves throughout A Woman Under the Influence prompts us to re-evaluate the traditional domestic roles that are preassigned to both husbands and wives. And it is Rowlands’ manic yet sensitive performance that highlights the psychological consequences of this oppressive system.

The film is obviously not shapeless, like a discarded shawl draped over the arm of a chair, but sinuous... Rowlands brings Mabel to life with such pained honesty and empathy, never denying her dignity, or dignifying pop culture bromides about bipolar people.

The notion that people’s understandings run deeper than their ideologies is certainly a contestable one, yet it operates as a prerequisite for appreciating Cassavetes’ work. In A Woman Under the Influence... this dubious notion is compulsively enacted through raw nerves made flesh, and powerfully embodied in a family’s grappling efforts to achieve its own coherence.

Guided by Cassavetes’s incredible ability, an actor manages to guide the viewer through a structure that has a lot of freedom within it. It’s like when you watch a game and the players are playing it and there’s a set of rules, but the result of the game depends on the skill of the players themselves.

Everything seems so free and wild and organic. It’s like looking at a Fauvist painting—it looks easy and natural, but the amount of energy that’s in the film is something that’s hard to capture. Anyone who has been involved in filmmaking knows that it is almost impossible to get to those levels of truth.

The goal, as ever with Cassavetes, was authenticity, yet the surprise is how much of the morass of material assembled here actually rings false... [A Woman Under the Influence] is the film most keen to impress upon the viewer this director's painstakingly perverse methods and motives.

The film presents several scenes of tremendous warmth, with sincere camaraderie, clumsiness, and sensitivity. At the same time, Nick's inability to relate to Mabel's affliction leads to explosive aggression and threats of violence.

Everyone remembers the talking in Cassavetes films, but really, a great deal of what’s said in these arguments, confessions, blow-ups, and apologies is secondary to the long stares and the nervous laughter. Few artists have explored so clearly the noise of human life, but even less have been able to so strongly evoke what the distortion is hiding.

The tension in the film, as in all of Cassavetes' work, is between expressivity and opacity. His characters seethe and rage with emtion. They speak, cry, shout, declaim their emtions with a physical fury to match... With Cassavetes, image, gesutre and language converge into a cinema of the absurd. The film is nearly electrically alive with Cassavetes empathy for his characters.

[A Woman Under the Influence] is one of the rawest, toughest, most emotionally scalding portraits of a marriage ever put on screen.

A Woman Under the Influence remains a culturally and historically significant piece of filmmaking, just as important and profound now as it was then. An exceptional film anchored by love and set alight with the unpredictability of mental health, this is a must for Cassavetes fans and newcomers alike.

If A Woman Under the Influence is Cassavetes’ most probing, as well as most focused work, it is because the filmmaker’s sensitivity and characteristically tolerant view of people, an approach that springs from his actor-centered subjective realism, is wedded to an exploration of a situation of greatly heightened emotional intensity: a mental breakdown and its fallout.