Word: nicking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kael is perfectly right in sensing that "he somehow thinks that Nick and Mabel really love each other and that A Woman Under the Influence is a tragic love story." Perhaps the crux of the movie is the scene where Mabel's husband, Nick, yields to outside pressures and agrees to commit her to a mental institution. Mabel tries to defend herself: "I always understood you and you always understood me--till death do us part, Nick...
Commenting on the director's stylistics, Kael states. "This time [Cassavetes, the director] abandons his handsome, grainy simulated cinema-verite style." Stephen states: "The only scene of Nick at work is shot in the handsome, grainy, cinema-verite style characteristic of Cassavetes's earlier work." Kael closes her article by comparing Cassavetes to Harold Pinter: "[Cassavetes's] special talent--it links his work to Pinter's--is for showing intense suffering from nameless causes." Stephen, towards the end of his review, states, "Cassavetes's admirers compare his home-movie method to Harold Pinter's drama...
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...
...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 in a finale accompanied by a thunderous orchestra. The only scene of Nick at work is shot in the handsome, gralay, cinema-verite style characteristic of Cassavetes's earlier work. We got a sense of the other source of pressure in Nick's life, although the workers here as in other seenes are just a bit romanticized...
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...