Actor/director John Cassavetes’ cycle of
semi-improvised movies reached a new level with Husbands, a showpiece
for the acting of Casssavetes and his pals Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. By
melding his signature style of spontaneous performance with the specific energies of
established screen personalities, Cassavetes achieved a noteworthy synthesis of
Hollywood artifice and verité grunginess. Yet while the picture is historically
significant as a formative step for the burgeoning indie-cinema aesthetic—of
which Cassavetes is now considered the de facto godfather—Husbands is an
acquired taste. Like all of the director’s improv-driven pictures, Husbands
is an overlong and repetitive survey of unappealing behavior, presenting
endless scenes of self-involved people groping with language and violent
physicality as they strive to articulate petty anxieties. The problem, as
always, is that Cassavetes fails to explore his fascinations in a balanced way,
so there’s no real context around the characters. Thus, viewers are subjected
to a world in which men have tacit license to follow every whim, no matter how
injurious the results might be to other people—and yet viewers are expected to
sympathize with these boors.
The story is so simple that the film could (and
should) have run 90 minutes instead of nearly 140. After a close friend dies of
a sudden heart attack, buddies Frank (Falk), Gus (Cassavetes), and Harry
(Gazzara) go on a drunken bender as they wrestle with the shocking reminder of
their mortality. The first half of the movie comprises the pals meandering from
the funeral to various New York dives, drinking and singing and whining all the
way. The second half of the picture begins when Harry fights with his wife and
impulsively decides to fly to England. Concerned for Harry’s emotional welfare,
Frank and Gus tag along, so the pals end up in a London hotel with three women
they pick up in a bar. And so it goes from there, up until the inconclusive
ending.
Fans of Cassavetes’ work generally single out the freshness of the
acting as a core virtue, but the performances by the three leads in Husbands
hardly seem praiseworthy. While it’s true that Cassavetes, Falk, and Gazzara generate verisimilitude by channeling the sloppy way real people move
and talk, there’s a reason screen acting generally involves shrinking normal
human behavior down to illustrative indicators—watching “real” people in real
time is boring. And that, from my perspective, is the best possible adjective
for describing Husbands. Sure, critics have spent decades talking about
how the picture captures the unchained id of the male animal, blah-blah-blah,
and there’s a kernel of truth within that interpretation. After all, the
characters in Husbands are as likely to break down in tears as they are
to physically and/or verbally abuse women, so there’s nothing flattering in the
picture Cassavetes paints. Whether there’s anything interesting in the
picture, however, is another matter.
Husbands:
FUNKY
6 comments:
Surely one of the more obnoxious movie posters of its era! Who *wouldn't* avoid those loudmouth old men in their ridiculous tuxes who smell like cheap rye if they ran into them in a bar?
You can tell I'm pretty mixed on Cassavetes. Loved him in ROSEMARY'S BABY but have found his directorial output... yep, you were dead-on: boring. And all that ACTING!!
I bailed on this film after about 10 or 15 minutes, after one of the actors threw up in a phone booth or the mens' room.
Although I am in the minority here because I do like Cassavetes as a director and I did overall like the movie I agree with Peter above about the first 15 minutes as there seems to be an excessive amount of puking going on by one of the characters. You don't see it, but the sound of the throwing up gets way overdone and I am sure alot of people probably bailed on it after that.
I like the "idea" of John Cassevetes more than the actual films. They're all too long and too self-indulgent, and yet if they were cut down they wouldn't have the power that they do. When you make it through one of his films, you feel as if you've been through the ringer - and that's a good thing. The bad thing is that I've only seen most of them once and some - not at all ( The Killing of a Chinese Bookie?)
Just saw this for the first time last night, wow, definitely a trip. And I too almost turned it off around the scene of them throwing up in the bathroom. That scene didn't bother me anywhere as much as the previous scene where they're in the bar taking turns singing. That scene was so overlong and bizarre. I'm glad I hung in with it though cause after they leave the bar, I liked the whole rest of the film, especially most of the London stuff. He got something out of his actors that I don't even know how to put into words but great stuff. I would give it 4 out of 5 stars if it wasn't for that annoying scene which drops it to a 3.
This was the first of the Cassavetes disasters I saw as a college student back in the early '70s. Even then it struck me as one of the worst films I had ever seen. I was familiar with his "Faces" but hadn't yet seen it. Having now seen it and a few other Cassavetes films, I realize I am too old to subject myself to anymore of his abominations.
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