Midway through “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974) — one of a number of astonishing films starring Gena Rowlands, who died Wednesday, and directed by her husband John Cassavetes — the distance between you and what’s onscreen abruptly vanishes. It’s the kind of moment that true movie believers know and yearn for, that transporting instance when your world seems to melt away and you’re one with the film. It can be revelatory; at times, as with Rowlands’s performance here, it can also be excruciatingly, viscerally painful.
Rowlands is playing Mabel, an exuberantly alive woman of great sensitivities whose husband, Nicky (Peter Falk), loves her deeply but doesn’t understand her. They’re home and he has just yelled at her in front of some colleagues, who’ve fled. Now, as this husband and wife look at each other across their dining-room table, they struggle to push past the rancor and hurt. But Mabel is struggling harder because her purchase on everyday life has begun to badly slip, bewildering them both. Her love for Nicky and their children feels boundless, and it radiates off her like a fever, but Mabel is headed for a breakdown.
As the two begin working it out, Cassavetes cuts between them, framing each in isolating close-up. At first, Nicky looks at her with a faint, inscrutable smile that Mabel doesn’t return. Instead, she stares at him and holds up a thumb, as if she were getting ready to hitch a ride out, then she begins a strange pantomime. She screws her face into a scowl, waves her arms, mimes some words. Rowland had an incredibly expressive, near-elastic face and equally extraordinary control of it, and the quicksilver shifts she uses here are unexpected and destabilizing; you want to keep watching Mabel but aren’t sure you can.
Within seconds, Nicky and Mabel are talking again and revisiting or, really, relitigating what just happened. “Wacko!” he yells. “I like your friends,” she answers, her voice rising. As Mabel keeps talking, Rowlands widens her eyes but she also shifts the character’s focus inward. Suddenly, Mabel isn’t looking at Nicky and she isn’t exactly talking to him, either. Instead, as Mabel animatedly continues, her gestures and expressions growing more exaggerated, she no longer seems present. She’s somewhere else and then just as abruptly she returns to the here and now, and everything shifts again. Mabel looks at Nicky, her face open and soft. “Tell me what you want me to — how you want me to be,” she says. “I can be that. I can be anything.”
Rowlands breaks my heart each time I watch this scene, to the point that sometimes I’ve been reluctant to revisit it. It’s overwhelming and, even after repeat viewings, it’s still shocking, and it seems as intimate and genuine as my own agonizing fights and struggles. I feel the performance — and Mabel’s confusion and desperation — in my bones. Cassavetes’s movies can be startlingly real and raw, and are wholly unformulaic, so much so that viewers mistakenly believed they were improvised. They were scripted, yet Cassavetes also gave his actors the room they needed to find their characters, so much so that there are moments — as in this scene — when you wonder if the actors have somehow become lost in their roles.
I love Mabel’s line “I can be anything,” because that’s what I think about Rowlands. She could be and do and convey anything, from ordinary emotions to great pain and unbridled, infectious joy. She could also freak you out; she even freaked out Cassavetes, as Rowlands recalls in the documentary “A Constant Forge.” She and Falk were playing through a palpably intense confrontation in another scene in “A Woman Under the Influence,” when Nicky and a doctor are dealing with a distraught Mabel. There was a cinematographer on set but Cassavetes was also filming it with a hand-held camera when everything seemed to go south.
They had been working on the scene for a while, Rowlands says in “A Constant Forge,” explaining that it took a lot to get to that intensely fraught moment while still keeping her point of view as a performer. “You aren’t becoming this person, you’re representing this person.” Yet as they were shooting that scene and its emotional intensity started to ratchet up, Cassavetes grew alarmed at what was unfolding. “She’s gone,” he said of Rowlands, before he dropped the camera and crashed her scene. “I think he thought he pushed me just a step too far,” she says with faint amusement. He hadn’t. Instead, working in concert, Rowlands and Cassavetes had in this film pushed themselves to the point of perfection.
They did that again and again in other films that upon their release some audiences and critics embraced, and others rejected as self-indulgent and worse. Together, they were finding a new way of making movies, and just in time, too. The old Hollywood system was effectively dead when Cassavetes and Rowlands started making movies together, and the American independent cinema was decades away from becoming anything like a commercially viable movement. They were showing that it was possible to create personal films that spoke to real people, and that said something about life rather than canned fantasies.
Rowlands and Cassavetes changed American cinema, and they also, as importantly, changed the women in it, making films that spoke to their liberated moment. Cassavetes may not have been a feminist, strictly speaking. Yet he and Rowlands made some of the greatest, truest films about women. In Rowlands, Cassavetes had an obvious muse; he also had an equal, a partner who could go to the edge, who could open veins, break hearts and blow minds with characters who were messy and real inside and out, and gloriously, at times terrifyingly imperfect. There have always been brilliant actresses who could bring great art and honest feeling to the screen. Few have been as transcendent as Rowlands — an immortal.
Read More: Watch One Heartbreaking Scene to Understand Gena Rowlands’s Genius
