A Woman Under the Influence

A Woman Under the Influence (another from my Max watchlist) is a 1974 award-winning drama film written and directed by John Cassavetes. The story follows a woman (Gena Rowlands) whose behavior leads to conflict with her blue-collar husband (Peter Falk) and family. Peter falk is underappreciated. I'm attracted to films that deal with mental illness. These characters go through real pain as they struggle to deal with the woman's behavior.

trailer:

The Criterion Collection says,

If you look at it from one end of the telescope, it’s a hyperrealistic portrait of a woman going mad, a bravura performance in a vaguely working-class setting, a sort of déclassé American version of Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face (1976), without Bergman. From the other end, it’s a richly detailed experience, alternately soaring and gut-wrenching, composed in two long, mighty, almost but not quite unwieldy movements. And it’s about . . . what? Men and women? Family life? The difficulty of distinguishing between your real and ideal selves? Male embarrassment? All of the above, none of the above. Tagging a movie like Woman with something as neat as a “subject” is a fairly useless activity. “John had antennae like Proust,” Peter Falk once wrote. A Woman Under the Influence and Faces, probably his two greatest films, are both ultimately as impossible to pin down as In Search of Lost Time. Like Proust before him, Cassavetes rode the whims, upsets, vagaries, and mysterious impulses of humanity like a champion surfer.

Senses of Cinema opens its thorough consideration with this:

A Woman Under the Influence is a rarity. It manages to be both an incisive commentary on sexual politics, and one of the great heterosexual love stories of modern American film, independent or otherwise. The film’s focus on a “female problem”, a “condition” that psychiatrists in earlier times referred to as hysteria, enriches it greatly as an earthy romance. It also asks: How does one cope with one’s own emotions in the face of interfering in-laws and parents? Cassavetes’ film is not so much an examination of gender roles, as a study of the characters that take them for granted.

The A.V. Club says,

In Influence, that unhinged life belongs to Rowlands, a working-class mother of great warmth and questionable mental stability whose eccentric behavior both attracts and embarrasses her husband (Falk). His discomfort forces her eccentricity into increasingly uncomfortable forms as Falk and Rowlands—in performances of almost indescribable intensity—detail a marriage anchored by love, but tossed by the expectations of others and the unpredictable swell of madness.

The Guardian reviewer says the film changed his life. Roger Ebert has it on his list of Great Movies. Cinephilia and Beyond calls it "Cassavetes’ Intense and Emotionally Exhausting Slice of Life". Empire Online concludes, "At two-and-a-half hours, it could easily have dragged but with such strong performances, you're left wanting more."