directingfilm: A whole generation of critics...

Saturday, January 14, 2012

A whole generation of critics misunderstood Cassavetes so spectacularly that the ones who are still around are probably too embarrassed to take a second look. The Gustav Mahler of cinema, Cassavetes was excoriated in his lifetime for formlessness, lack of focus and modulation, etc. and ad infinitum. And, like Mahler, his work has come back after his death to haunt those who were so quick with their doctrinaire judgments. Actor’s Studio exercises, formless improvisations, and unmodulated emotionalism are all you’re going to see if you look at every movie with the expectation that it will/should be broken up into visually and behaviorally pointed units. Films like A Woman Under the Influence defy a century’s worth of film theory, screenwriting tips, and film school orthodoxy. When you look at a close-up in a film by almost anyone else, you’re looking at a representation of the idea of an emotion, no matter how detailed the acting. In Cassavetes, every blink, every shrug, every hesitation counts and drives the story forward.

What is A Woman Under the Influence? If you look at it from one end of the telescope, it’s a hyper-realistic portrait of a woman going mad, a bravura performance in a vaguely working-class setting, a sort of déclassé Americanization 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.

~ A Woman Under the Influence: The War at Home

Lovely piece that will get you to revisit your thinking