Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

philmbuph To understand this story, it might be best for anyone to read a story by a writer called Charlotte Perkins Gilman called "The Yellow Wallpaper" or read Virginia Woolf's "500 Pounds and a Room of One's Own" or to watch a Twilight Zone episode called "Something in the Walls" (newer TZ episode series from 1988).Mabel is a woman who is not allowed to be herself, and her constructed self, to appease the family, has no real point of genesis, in which case, when she can't "act" as in acting well or when her "act" as a performance does not work, this constructed self dissolves. Most people notice in this movie that the 2 mothers are also beaten down creatures who do not offer Mabel any sense of gender culture or support or sorority because they themselves have been abused in like manner over the years and have not recognized it for what it was. Mabel is perfectly adequate as a square peg...she fails when she tries to fit into the round hole of her dim husband's notions of what a wife should be. Moreover, he's not grown up, either and has his and her family there as a constant audience and Greek chorus because he does not recognize that being a man is more than working at a job. The spaghetti scene is really Mabel being sarcastic and angry without realizing it. She is a creative person, she acts, dances and sings for her children. This same talent is what's brought her so low-she's been a good actress to appease her husband, so the meal is about her saying "am I being a good enough drudge now?" She doesn't recognize her own anger and therefore can't express it effectively. Nick flies into rages because he thinks she's embarrassing him, but he's the embarrassment because he's too much of a hypocrite to stand up for her before both sets of parents and his friends to say " I like her as she is-she's MY eccentric wife, not yours and I'll have her the way she is".His cruelty stems from his stupidity and immaturity. There are so many men like him in the world, always out to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. These performances as some other reviewer said, are harrowing because most people recognize these people in themselves and in members of their OWN families. He wants to crush the very thing he loves about her-this is the basis of her neurotic behavior, trying to crunch herself into a tiny box to be socially acceptable, rather than making her husband realize that his lack of acceptance of her as she is is the problem. Use your hand to cover the kitchen faucet-what happens? The water just sprays out around the sides and splashes everything else. The faucet is not at fault-it can't operate well with your hand over its opening. The side spray is Mabel's psyche trying to find some release somewhere. This is not an easy film to watch, nevertheless you must watch it. The dynamics of the creation of dysfunction in a family here are as true and as recognizable as they are in the biblical Story of David. Her only support are her children; they recognize that she's fine and that her activities with them are an outlet, and they love her for her flights of fancy, her creativity which has otherwise gone undeveloped, and her tenderness towards them. Nick's true inadequacy becomes apparent in his attempts to be a good father-he loves them, but he's no more equipped to be a parent than a spouse. He does not have the courage to leave his wife alone during his wife's process of defining herself. His Neanderthal male posturing and dimwitted outlook make him think it's his privilege to define her himself. If Mabel can't be herself, she thinks,then "who am I?". Everyone's trying to prevent her from being herself. Her intelligence and sensitivity terrifies and intimidates everyone in the family, because they know they have knuckled under to mere role-playing in life. They have hidden rage against her because she has more guts than either set of parents or her husband. They literally try to beat it(and fry it=electroshock therapy) out of her.Mabel is the very true and hideous image of the results of emotional oppression.

hughman55 Another IMDb reviewer, Dolly_Lo, wrote a review in September 2009, titled "Don't Accept It". See below:"Cassavetes was clearly an intelligent, sensitive man with bold new ideas about making films. He wanted to be an auteur, to break away from the confines of the system and bring a new realism to the American cinema. For that, I applaud him.Unfortunately, as a member of his audience, I cannot applaud A Woman Under the Influence. Cassavetes took what could have been a fascinating topic (an insane woman) and somehow managed to craft a dull film, filled with lengthy, ad-libbed ranting and drawn-out scenes. He seems to have had a gift for capturing the dullest moments of a person's life on film, and it often appears as though he simply turned the camera on his family and let the motor run and run. This tactic would be acceptable if Cassavetes had captured something devastatingly REAL -- or even a kernel of something so real it touched the heart in ways a conventional film could not. Yet I found the performances, particularly Rowlands', to be artificial. I never believed for a moment that she was really insane. I have met people who are truly mentally disturbed, yet I've never seen any of them act quite like Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. She played it like a very obnoxious, uninhibited woman who drinks a lot, and even that was confusing because we only see her drink once (at the beginning), but she acts drunk for the remainder of the film. There are some moments in which she taps into something real, but those moments are few and far between; she fails to sustain a seamless mentally disturbed character. Again, I applaud her efforts, but effort alone is not enough to make the performance ring true.Novice audiences who happen upon this film and see its high IMDb rating will no doubt feel compelled to love it and rate it highly, just to prove that they 'get it.' But don't be brainwashed by the hype -- judge for yourself. You don't have to pretend to like it.Like Woody Allen, John Cassavetes could be accused of solipsism in his film-making, seeming to find his own psyche and his own life experiences so endlessly fascinating that he couldn't imagine that to others they appeared presumptive and tortuously self-indulgent. But Woody Allen at least has demonstrated a gift for keeping an audience entertained -- he knows that a compelling story structure and a good dose of humor are essential to any movie. If Cassavetes had employed some self-discipline (and a sharp pair of editing shears!), A Woman Under the Influence could have stood a chance. But what's the point of making a 'realistic' film if the only people who can stand to sit through it are the art-house devotees and film students who worship Cassavetes as some sort of anti-establishment deity? Without dumbing anything down, I believe Cassavetes could have made A Woman slightly more accessible by keeping the pace moving with an actual plot, instead of presenting a string of 30 minute-long scenes of ad-libbed arguments. If you just make films for yourself and a few of your fans, you're just reaching the already converted. Watch this movie with your own set of eyes and make your own decisions about it. If you are truly moved and fascinated by it, good for you." I don't think I can improve on this review as it exactly reflects my own independent impression of this film. Dolly_Lo, however, has already read my mind and written it herself so I'll just site her and leave it at that. I would only add this. Take a hatchet and chop this film up. Put it back together anyway you like and it won't make a bit of difference it the outcome unless you choose to discard about 75% of it before reassembling. That would be an improvement.

Artimidor Federkiel "A Woman Under the Influence" - like other Cassavetes films - is a difficult one to put into any specific drawer. Which is a good thing as it is able to push different buttons for different people and keeps the viewer on the edge of their seat and actively involved throughout. Not in the Hollywood kind of way, mind you, full with overblown drama, enhanced with musical cues and a heart-warming love story at the core, but rather in a way that makes you care, feel that it matters, that gets under your skin as a person, not just as a movie consumer. The main reasons why the film is so engaging and absorbing lies in the fact that it draws from convincingly portrayed lives rooted in a Seventies reality, the lives of a blue collar husband and a housewife with two kids. It's a familiar constellation with the ordinary domestic mayhem between troubles, challenges and duties, the need to show emotions and to suppress them at the same time, and there's always the urge to escape. It all comes down to a life on the edge, where people as partners in marriage are trapped in the confines of their everyday existence.On the surface "A Woman Under the Influence" is about a woman going mad and people in her environment having to deal with it. But thanks to the characterisations of Gena Rowlands (Cassavete's wife in the part of Mabel Longhetti) and Peter Falk (as her husband Nick) a rather simple story like this gets complex and multi-layered. Cassavetes delivers cinéma vérité the way it is meant to be. The film shamelessly shows us our fears, the emotional abysses between people, confronts us with the resulting traumas, all based on the influences we have on each other. It makes us suffer with both protagonists and their efforts, their eventual helplessness to deal with the situation, to find the common ground of the relationship. And in a struggle things go overboard. "Will you please stand up for me?" Mabel asks in one crucial scene, and if we don't judge first but listen, we might also hear what she's trying to say.

cmccann-2 With starring roles in "The Dirty Dozen" and "Rosemary's Baby", John Cassavetes was one of Hollywood's strongest actors during the late 1960s. Today, however, he is perhaps better remembered for his innovations behind the camera - the author of 'Shadows', 'Faces', 'A Woman Under the Influence', and 'The Killing of a Chinese Bookie', films shot in a gritty, Cinema Verite-style that featured strong performances from a repertoire of actors including Seymour Cassel, Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, and Gena Rowlands."A Woman Under the Influence" is the apex of Cassavetes' artistry and perhaps his greatest film. It recounts the story of Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands), a housewife/mother with failing mental health. The film tells of the incidences that lead her to suffer a nervous breakdown, the toll Mabel's struggles have on her husband Nick (Peter Falk) and three children, and her shaky readjustment to normal life after a 6-month stay in a mental hospital.Gena Rowlands' performance as a troubled house-wife is powerful and electrifying. Cassavetes' style is frequently imitated but rarely bettered, and the extent of his talent is on full display here. The documentary filming helps draw us into the inner world of the family, and we as an audience are subject to the Longhetti's eccentricity and dysfunction but also the love and togetherness that offers a sort of transcendence. There have been many indie movies and docudramas centered on familial dysfunction since, but in terms of poetry and emotional resonance, "A Woman Under the Influence" is peerless.9/10