A Woman Under the Influence

John Cassavetes’s masterpiece retains the power to unnerve with its raw, often harrowing depiction of a blue-collar Los Angeles family on the rocks. Gena Rowlands’s performance as Mabel Longhetti, wife of everyman Nick (Peter Falk) and mother of three, stands as a virtually unmatched tour de force. As a woman struggling desperately to reconcile who she thinks she should be—as wife, mother, lover, friend—with the anarchic spirit she really is, Mabel is the kind of intense, complex, and above all deeply human role that is still all too rare in Hollywood.