Word: mabel
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...Mabel's husband Nick is well-intentioned and sometimes quite charming. But he's totally unaware of his choleric insensitivity. He can't get across what he means, at the same time his wife's feelings crupt in baroque and hyperactive detail. Nick literally tries to slap Mabel back to sanity. When the relatives gather for dinner upon her return from six months in an asylum, he exasperatedly demands. "Conversation! At parties people have conversation--you know--talk!" Near the end, his wife tries to lash her wrists, and in a clumsily symbolic scene. Nick stops the cut with...
...WOMAN UNDER THE Influence is a kind of inverted Godfather II. Coppola's film is recognized as socially-relevant because it treats real, albeit distant, issues, while in Woman, the anxiety and boredom of housewifery is close to home but often surrealistically overstated. Mabel waits for the schoolbus to return with her kids, pacing like an anxious speed freak, demanding passersby to give her the time, and chasing after them when they try to ignore her. At a party she gives for her own children, she stampedes them into a performance of Swan Lake and supervises their deaths...
This suggests a chief flaw in the movie, the lack of serious characters, besides Nick, on whom Mabel's madness can be registered. Both mothers-in-law are one-dimensional, and I'm not sure it's in the nature of mothers-in-law to be to. Eddie Shaw is unbelievably silly as the Jewish doctor who tries to intercode between Mabel and Nick. Mabel's father appears at the dinner to welcome his daughter back from the anylum and we find that her obsession with the children is supplemented by a heavy attachment to him--but the idea...
...subtlest relationship is Mabel's compulsive "production" of her children. The oldest boy, about ten, pretty well understands how anxious she is and seems to try to reassure her with his love; his younger brother, the favorite, is only dimly aware of what's going on. The little sister, apparently the victim of these cedipal ties, grows chubbier and more confused every...
...home-movie method to Harold Pinter's drama. Although his well-known closeness to the actors, and his dependence on them, is offset by the tighter script of Woman, many scenes are still too protracted and improvisory. The film is nicely framed by two dinner scenes in which Mabel gamely attempts to role-play her Image of sanity. But there are scenes within the film which threaten to wander out of the theater...