Cassavetes' best known film garnered Academy Award nominations for Best Director, and Best Actress for Gena Rowlands' bravura performance as the housewife whose ego is vanquished by the double binds of family life. Michael Ventura wrote for a Sundance US Film Festival tribute to Cassavetes: "...In Faces and Husbands, people got crazy for short bursts but they didn't go mad. Instead, with a resigned and even defeated air, they tended to return to the same repressed state that had driven them nuts in the first place. But in A Woman Under the Influence, Gena Rowlands' Mabel Longhetti is both desperate and courageous enough not to pull back from madness, but to go all the way over into a state of mind that confronts every assumption of her life with her husband Nick (Peter Falk). Perhaps it is this underlying sense of Mabel's intention that makes Rowlands and Cassavetes say they have never considered Mabel insane. She's just, to use Gena's word, `wacko.' Meaning that Mabel has her own way of seeing the world, and has a right to insist on the validity of her vision. Again Cassavetes uses his unique film craft to head us off at the pass. We want some distance between us and Mabel; we want to be able to look away, to get out of that house. Instead, like Mabel's family, we're trapped in her experience with her...there's no escape from the crisis. That's what family trouble means, and Cassavetes won't pretend otherwise with comfortable cuts and scene changes. Yet even in her worst pain, Mabel possesses a transcendent beauty that can't help but open our hearts. Again like her family, we love her, which completes Cassavetes' point...love costs, love demands, but its costs and demands are almost welcome as proof that profound love exists..."