The Animal Inside Her

Her name is Mabel Longhetti. She lives in Los Angeles in the 1970s
and wears housedresses with big flowers on them. She’s in her 40s,
beautiful, a homemaker, a smoker, a tornado of energy. And the moment
she runs into the frame—hurrying the kids into grandma’s car to
get ready for a night-without-the-kids with her husband—the movie
shatters open, pops to life, pulls your eyes in. Mabel is played by
Gena Rowlands, the real-life wife of John Cassavetes, who wrote and
directed A Woman Under the Influence (SIFF is showing a restored
print this weekend), and you can tell that he had access to her in ways
usually unavailable to directors. This lady they created together is a
freakishly vibrant mammal.

Rowlands’s costar is Peter Falk, who felt strongly enough about
Cassavetes’s screenplay that he asked to play Mabel’s husband and
invested $500,000 of his own money in the film (the total budget was
around $800,000). It was shot in 10-minute takes by a somewhat
untrained crew instructed to let the actors do whatever they were going
to do and try to capture it, documentary style, granting plenty of room
for spontaneity. Adding to the suspense, according to interviews,
Rowlands and Falk were deprived of information about what the other was
going to do. The result is a crackling animalism. It’s like two beasts
walked onto the set, devoured the actors, and took over.

She’s more of an animal than he is. On the one hand, she keeps a tidy house, her kids are
well-behaved, and she’s fully capable of whipping up
spaghetti for a dozen men when her husband, Nick, comes home from work
unannounced with his hungry coworkers in hard hats. On the other hand,
she’s really super weird—physiological spasms, gesturing at
nothing, talking like a baby, scrunching her nose like a rabbit,
dancing on the furniture, repeating adult conversations in a singsong
voice, etc. After sending the kids off, an all-night crisis keeps Nick
at work, so she wanders around the house smoking, then out into the
street, then into a bar, where she tugs at the nape of a stranger’s
neck and starts talking to him like they’re old friends and goes home
with him and, when they wake up, insists that he is Nick. The man does
not know who Nick is. “I’m not in the mood for games, Nick,” she says
determinedly. “Nick Longhetti,” she says, pointing to him. “Mabel
Longhetti,” she says, pointing to herself.

Since the movie was released in 1974 and since Mabel has no purpose
other than taking care of the household, it seems coded in feminist
question marks: Is she truly crazy, or is she just rebelling against
society’s rules? With nothing else to occupy her time, isn’t it plausible that a woman in the prime of her life might naturally
fall into a vortex of formless neuroses and start giving them form?

That spaghetti meal is one of the most awkward, fascinating dining-room
scenes in American cinema. When one of the workmen starts singing
opera, Mabel goes over to him and puts her face bizarrely close to his
singing-at-full-volume mouth, trying to look down his throat, and then
she tries to get another of the men to dance, and Nick, embarrassed at
her behavior, screams, “Sit your ass down!” Later, she insists she was
simply trying not to be a stiff, not to be a square. The subtext of the
scene—men can do whatever they want (spontaneously start singing
opera) and no one finds it crazy—only dawns on you later, because
of your focus on the surfaces: the angles, the acting, the
dialogue.

Ultimately, it’s a movie about character, allergic to political messages and the
vectors of social theory. Mabel is such an original creature that the
idea of her standing in for womankind is absurd. Is she psychotic?
Eccentric? On to something? Rowlands’s performance incinerates anything
remotely close to an answer. Even the critic Pauline Kael, who disliked
Cassavetes’s films, finding them murky and actorly, admired Rowlands’s
range this time out: “Mabel fragments before our eyes: a three-ring
circus might be taking place in her face. Rowlands’ performance is
enough for half a dozen tours de force, a whole row of
Oscars—it’s exhausting.”

Falk’s performance is awesome, too. He is embarrassed by her and in
love with her simultaneously. Halfway into the movie, he decides to
commit her to a mental hospital, then (with a few marvelously complex
facial expressions while watching her lose her shit) his animal love for her overwhelms him and he
changes his mind. He turns on the doctor who’s arrived. Nick’s
fire-breathing mother overrules
her son: “This woman has to go! This woman can’t stay in this house
anymore!”

Nick’s mother is a minor character, but crucial, and the actress
playing her is so good it’s surprising to discover that she’s John
Cassavetes’s mom. (She only did three movies, all by him.) Some of the
kids are Cassaveteses, too. A Woman Under the Influence is a
masterpiece of filmmaking, marvelous in new ways every time you watch
it, and proof that you can make a fascinating, stylish, complicated
movie with no studio backing, no distributor (Cassavetes distributed it
himself, by calling up independent movie theaters and college
campuses), and a cast and crew of friends. They were a family, a unit, a brood. This movie is
about a hundred different kinds of love.