The first time I watched A Woman Under the Influence, I didn’t make it through to the end. I barely made it through the beginning. Mabel is frantically packing her children off to stay with her mother, and there already exists a borderline unbearable, untrammelled feeling of peril emanating from that uniquely dazzling, dangerous performance. […] Rowlands has scarcely been on the screen for two minutes and I was utterly disoriented, frightened for her, but also for myself. Which is weird, because in no way do I resemble Mabel Longhetti – except, I guess, in a fundamental shared humanity, which I had simply never before (or since) seen so nakedly exposed.[…]
[It is] difficult to place Rowlands’s performance where one would initially imagine it most easily belonging: within the framework of mid-70s second-wave feminism. Mabel is the ultimate unfulfilled homemaker, but shreds the second-wave template because her unhappiness runs deeper than patriarchal society can account for, and because she is never available for rescue by solidarity or sisterhood. Not that it's even an option, given how her mother-in-law, her friends and the women on the street who literally won’t give her the time of day respond to her.
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As Molly Haskell wrote in her Sight and Sound obituary for Rowlands, “We were beginning to look… for ‘positive role models’. That was not to be Rowlands’s mission. Hers was to further disturb our sleep.” It disturbs it still.
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Mabel and Nick have what in today’s tired parlance would be a 'toxic relationship'. But some toxins can, at low doses, be used to manage chronic conditions and so it seems to be with the violence – mental and physical – that marks their marriage.
— Jessica Kiang: Sight and Sound, December 2024
Synopsis: Mabel Longhetti, desperate and lonely, is married to a Los Angeles municipal construction worker, Nick. Increasingly unstable, especially in the company of others, she craves happiness, but her extremely volatile behavior convinces Nick that she poses a danger to their family and decides to commit her to an institution for six months. Alone with a trio of kids to raise on his own, he awaits her return, which holds more than a few surprises.