THE SCREEN:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
PORTRAIT OF A LADY A woman under the influence is bound to act crazy, and Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands), the woman in John Cassavetes' new film called A Woman Under the Influence, does just that....
...In carnal fact the guy may have spent the night with Mabel after all, but she was already done with him, the impulse that had led to him was already spent, before he ever got that far...
...With this sudden little jump in time the film moves us, as Mabel herself has moved, from the expectation that Nick is coming to the realization that he isn't...
...After Mabel has brought home her pick-up the night Nick breaks their date, she changes her mind and begins beating back his advances...
...When Mabel goes over the edge, for instance, and seems to fall into a revery, Nick threatens to slug her...
...If craziness is simply a "mental disorder," as the phrase goes, Nick's actions abound in craziness...
...And the more we watch her and Nick, the more we wonder whether she might not be right...
...But when the next time Mabel sees these people, six months later when she returns home, their personalities are insanely reversed...
...But what is Mabel under the influence of: that drink she took, the shot the doctor gave her, the moon...
...The only one who is calm and truly helpful is the doctor...
...Cut, end of scene...
...As the film proceeds, however, its montage becomes more pronounced and radical...
...When it is suddenly night time and Nick still isn't home, it appears to us that he isn't coming home, and this in fact turns out to be the case...
...Mother-in-law is now the rational, effective, helpful one, while the doctor immediately begins apologizing for her commitment in a manner as obsessive and insensitive as the mother's-in-law had been earlier...
...Then it is night, and she still sits alone in her housecoat listening to opera...
...The truth is that Nick did slap her in the face, but he did it much earlier, when he arrived home to find her and the father of his children's playmates in an upstairs bedroom trying to control the children...
...Finally Mabel freaks out altogether so that Nick has to call the family doctor and have her committed...
...Even when trying to help Mabel, everyone is so preoccupied working out his own problems that he works them out at Mabel's expense...
...Most of the things he does are done out of order, out of that natural, logical, cause-and-effect sequence we all regard as reality...
...None of them is as consistent or stable as they at first looked...
...In a way A Woman Under the Influence was made under the influence of the woman herself and is as crazy as she is...
...In the end also, Nick finally manages to be on time for that big celebration he had promised Mabel in the beginning...
...She lays out her clothes and spends the afternoon listening to opera on her portable radio...
...Jumping to a wrong, ridiculous conclusion about Mabel and this stranger, Nick slapped her not in compassion, but in anger...
...Here as elsewhere, it's as if the movie itself blacked out at the moments when Mabel does, when she can't take anymore...
...So many scenes seem to be what the film's title is, an incomplete phrase...
...She goes to a bar, picks up the first guy she meets, downs a tumbler of booze, and takes him home for a one-night stand...
...As director-scriptwriter, Cassavetes imbeds her experience of events, her point of view, in the very structure of his film...
...In this company Mabel isn't such an odd ball...
...As always, the event and the occasion don't match by the time they occur...
...but he will do it later when he discovers Mabel innocently closeted with the man whose children had come over to play...
...In the opening sequence she waits for Nick to come home and pick her up for a big night out on the town they have apparently been planning for a long time...
...The night that she cracks up her mother-in-law exacerbates the situation by becoming almost as irrational as Mabel is...
...The night Mabel has her breakdown, Nick finally brandishes the commitment authorization at her and shouts, "Mabel, look at me...
...However crazy she may be, we soon begin to realize, he is no less so himself...
...Although this turns out not to be literally so—the guy emerges from the bathroom a few minutes later—Cassavetes' point seems to be that it was so emotionally...
...While this struggle is still in progress, the film cuts to the following morning, and we see Mabel waking up alone...
...Along with the other decapitated events we have watched in this movie, Mabel's commitment becomes something like that slap that wasn't delivered, or rather was delivered at the wrong time, a decisive blow struck out of order...
...The cut from expectation to disappointment is not too abrupt here, and appearances and reality pretty much coincide...
...She paces the street so frantically waiting for her children that pas-sersby shun her in alarm...
...The occasion is Mabel's release from the sanitarium, and nothing could be a less thoughtful welcome than the house full of people Nick has invited...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...It's a possibility that might make a certain sense, as a way to snap her out of it...
...Butting up these two shots against each other leads us to believe Mabel must have thrown the guy out...
...But instead of going through 'with it, Nick goes to let in the doctor he himself called, and then begins assuring the doctor that everything is now OK, as if he had slapped Mabel out of her trance after all...
...In the end, nonetheless, Mabel comes up smiling, having endured it all and ready to go on though the result will no doubt be more of the same...
...If we are alarmed for the moment that Nick will discover them and fly into a rage, perhaps we only reflect Mabel's own feelings of guilt...
...Cassavetes' editing begins to violate the reality of events in order to get at psychological reality...
...At last Nick winds up acting rather drunk, though he's had nothing to drink, at a dinner table crowded with uneasy relatives...
...Though the guy is gone, Nick will indeed fly into that rage...
...I have a piece of paper here that says...
...When another parent brings his children to play with hers, she so disconcerts him and excites the kids that her husband Nick (Peter Falk) arrives home to find the house in bedlam...
...Far from bringing Mabel out of her trance, Nick's slap, delivered out of order, put her into it...
...A compassionate slap in the face is sometimes approved therapeutic procedure...
...The action next cuts to Nick's belated arrival home when we are not yet sure whether the guy Mabel spent the night with is gone...
...One thing Mabel is under the influence of is Nick...
...At one point she even begins making the sign of the cross at him not in the spirit of benediction, but as if to ward him off, as if he were an evil spirit under whose influence she feared to fall...
...It seems there really is something indestructible between him and Mabel—something that has now, somehow, allowed him to feel the effects of that tumbler of booze Mabel drank many, many months ago...
...Maybe they're all nuts...
...Now appearances, the way the shots and scenes are juxtaposed, begin to represent the latter sort of reality instead of the former...
...Once again, it would seem, things have happened out of order...
...He is a man under the influence, of her...
...Mabel's whole world is a tangle like this of misplacement, mismatching and misconstrual...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 13
