A Woman Under the Influence
by John Cassavetes
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Fred Draper, Gena Rowlands, Katherine Cassavetes, Lady Rowlands, Peter FalkDirector: John Cassavetes
DVD: 2 Sides, Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: Pan & Scan, 1.33:1
Running Time: 147 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1998-03-24
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Geneon [Pioneer]
Movie Reviews of A Woman Under the Influence
Movie Review: Get under this film's influence, now!
Summary: 5 Stars
Coming from a background in improvisational theater, Cassavetes has the ability to write film scripts that show us exactly how far conventional storytelling has wandered from reality. Rather than doing this, as the early postmodernists would, by defying the conventions of narrative, Cassavetes chooses to defy, primarily, the conventions of scene framing and dialogue scripting. If you eavesdrop on a conversation between two people who know each other, you are likely to catch them at a moment where one is referring to something that the other has said in a previous conversation, and also employing irony, and also tonally begging the other to excuse the fact that he is beginning to employ such irony with a regularity that threatens to dull the other's perception of his character. John Cassavetes is unafraid to start a scene with this type of exchange, rather than imposing the situation-simplifying and character-stilting type of directness into his scripts that often causes perceptive viewers to suspect that the characters in a scene are not speaking to each other, but rather to the audience. The result of this technique, in his various films, has been mixed, but in A Woman Under The Influence, he really manages to make the viewer empathize with unedited reality, by sculpting a story from large chunks of it, and telling the story in the way it would have been likely to happen, rather than the way it would have been likely to be told.
This can all seem incredibly self-conscious at times, because Cassavetes' attempt to remove the character of the filmmaker from his script in A Woman... is the one thing which most prominently stands out. It requires an acute awareness of his medium for an artist to attempt what Cassavetes has attempted here, and the attempt itself is likely to provoke the usual maelstrom of shouts of "pretentious" from detractors of artists who seem to attempt to provoke particular reactions. But content-wise, A Woman Under The Influence is one of the least pretentious films ever created, and in my opinion, one of the most important.
Summary of A Woman Under the Influence
John Cassavetes's long, free-form drama is best appreciated as a good showcase for Gena Rowlands, playing a woman whose sanity literally appears to be shattering as different aspects of her personality eclipse others at various times. Peter Falk plays her struggling, blue-collar husband, trying to understand the phenomenon and sometimes losing his patience. As with most of Cassavetes's works as a director, one can't help but find one's attention drifting in and out (especially at two and a half hours), but Rowland's performance is a key reason the film has been declared a "national treasure" by the Library of Congress. --Tom KeoghA tough-minded, moving film about a working-class housewife's mental breakdown caused by imposed social rules. This insightful study of sexual politics earned both Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes an Oscar nomination. Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, and Matthew Cassel.
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