Husbands

What the hell is a comedy at the Cassavete house. You could cut an hour out of this and there would still be too much slow drunken improv

As a slice-of-life portrait, it's outstanding, as you'd expect from Cassavetes. Swerving back and forth from anguish to joy and laughter and back again, it never feels less than authentic and contains many great moments and snatches of dialogue. It is hard to get around the fact, however, that these guys are, at their worst, boorish and immature assholes. Still, a dynamic, entertaining and consistently engaging work.

Another Cassavetes film very much in the same vein as A Woman Under the Influence and Faces, as people vacillate between maintaining some kind of front and struggling to articulate their true feelings, plagued by moments of doubt followed by moments of resolve and then moments of regret. Although I don't think this one is quite as genuine as the other two films (for reasons I can't quite put my finger on), there are some wonderful insights. The three principals are, of course, dynamite.

Husbands is about exactly the sort of guys that completely infest most of Cassavetes' filmography: Loud-mouthed, abusive, drunken oafs, who are actually in the throes of midlife crises, castrated by family life and suffocated by their jobs. Their regression to childishness is a hopeless struggle to escape from the dreary fate of growing old as average husbands. What sets Husbands apart is that in no other film is this idea focused on and told as poignantly and deftly.

Pretty boring. Technically it is poorly made too. I think I saw a boom mic 4 times. Was Cassavetes just messing with us or was he serious? That's just lazy and amateur. Also, these characters aren't as interesting as Cassvetes thinks they are. The quasi rape scene in the hotel was so terrible to watch.

Husbands is about men who revert to an adolescent state in the futile hope of escaping their humdrum lives. They treat women badly because they don't really understand them, and this misunderstanding often leads to aggression, so accusations of misogyny are deeply misplaced. The three leads are excellent, and while it could have been trimmed, most of the long drawn out scenes have the desired effect of making the viewer uncomfortable. Not classic Cassavetes, but it's full of masterful moments.

Husbands is a Cassavetes film that even experienced Cassavetes film watchers aren't quite prepared for. It is a formalistically rebellious, gravely intimate reflection of the bareness of suburban life, magnified 500%, unpatronizing to and violatingly honest about its anxious, inarticulate sticks in the mud who have no idea what they're feeling while they're undergoing their feelings.

A great treatise on volatile human beings struggling to untangle the mess they've made of their lives. Only qualm is that the film needed a tighter edit.

Like most of Cassavetes other work it's a very raw stream of consciousness film with heavy emotions and nervous humour. I found it to be a notch below his other work, primarily due to not quite sympathetic characters, but still an entertaining and interesting time.

Boundlessly charismatic / insightful / horrific / spontaneous / entertaining / influential / .etc.

Cassavetes, Falk, AND Gazzara!

Doesn't seem as cohesive as his best films, but as usual there's some absolutely amazing material here. The singing contest is one of my favorite scenes in film; Cassavetes was a master of making you feel ten things at once.

Some of Cassavetes' films end up feeling more like an extended acting exercise than a film. I'm pretty much okay with that, but very long sequences of drunks singing around a table or vomiting in bathrooms can get to be a bit much. Although, truth be told, it might be utterly appropriate that a lot of this film feels like "a bit much".

This is not about the film itself, but I was shocked to see how much our understanding of flirting and consent has changed since then.

An endurance test.

Death of a loved one enables reflection and perhaps even uncertainty about our current realities. It's raw and improv-type narrative makes it relatable, but feels narrow and almost ignorant to anything outside of the masculine and childish behaviours as a result of our natural emotions.

A Cassavetes story about masculinity, it has interesting thoughts on that subject and good performances, though the characters are completely unsympathetic and frankly not all that interesting. It also drags in a ton of places and is probably at least a half hour too long. It just doesn't feel very cohesive, and I didn't like it nearly as much as much of his other work. There is some great stuff here, and the film could have been great, but it was uneven and just okay for me.

There's a long shot in a hotel room where we watch Cassavetes place a room-service order in painstaking detail, and it isn't until Cassavetes gets up and crosses the room that the camera pans slightly to the right and reveals that Ben Gazzara has been silently sobbing and trying to hide it the entire time. It's moments of immaculate, understated acting and pure naturalism like that which make Husbands worthwhile despite the fact that you could trim an hour of footage and not miss any of it.

The speed at which Jenny Runacre's character becomes infuriated with Cassavetes is evidence of how dislikable these three characters are. This is not to say the performances aren't worth a watch. They certainly are, but it is a difficult watch.

really wanted to enjoy this but it got more and more insufferable over time. there is too much misogyny and vomit, it is not deep nor funny. the ending was sweet though.

Did not finish.

I'm trying not to say anything bad, so ... If you like extremely uncomfortable close-ups throughout a two-and-a-half hour running time, this is the movie for you.

somewhere between a goya black and a cyst extraction

Peixes

While Faces revels in being artificial and unnatural, Husbands finds its discomfort from the fully exposed shittiness of its main characters. Beginning to think the only way to fully enjoy Cassavetes films is to get divorced a few times

Is there an unconscious meditation on May 1968, in the sense of a lost cause for freedom and revolution? The death of a friend confronts them with nothingness and pushes them into a dionysiac odyssey with lots of alcohol and women. Yet I wish this was not only about suburban white collar men where family and wives are portrayed as the evil behind their subjugation. What about the freedom of those wives? I couldn't find any substance besides a consistent and meticulous cinema verité style.

so i guess a shit-ton of american filmmakers have tried to remake this movie over the past decade or so (see: the entire Man-Child Comedy sub-genre), but it's kinda hard to compete with this shit. jesus christ.

fantastiskt skådespel

Scaringly close to home, there is a great joy evoked from the absolutely spot-on portrayal of friendship between the three leads, but it's a pathetic, childish, volatile sort of joy, one that I was quick to recognise. There's also a great pain seen in these masculine leads, which the nauseating cinematography is sure to often pick up, and dialogue tends to go nowhere over very long periods of time, causing most scenes to be irritable, yet essential to sit through.

difficult and nasty, but not without a good measure of sympathy. the characterisation of the men is fantastic, but the way some of the women respond to their actions is a little strange at times. mostly excellent, and pulls back the rug from the eyes of suburban family life.

Underrated.

The "It Was Just A Little Love Affair" scene is the type of thing that defines CASSAVETES. It's exactly what I expect from the man's films. Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and John are all excellent.

Very charming men indeed

#504

The history of American male aggression and insecurity comes filtered through Cassavetes, Falk and Gazzara's bravado. Better than authentic, they're fascinating.

My favorite moment is when they all drink and sing :)

I wish I could see the 4 hour cut with all the footage, I could watch Cass, Falk and Gazzara forever.

539

A brush with mortality and a midlife crisis, an unraveling and a regression. To be husband and father, the suburban status of middle class masculinity, especially as it relates to women, is a terrible existential threat for this trio of brutish man-children. The misogyny on display here is uncomfortable to endure. It's awkward and embarrassing at least, and quite often painful. Does the film offer any ultimate insight into this condition? Maybe not, but it's shown frankly for what it is.

684

# 639

Os Maridos estreava há 50 anos no Festival de São Francisco. Esse foi meu primeiro Cassavetes ever, quando esse tipo de filme ainda passava na TV aberta nos anos 90 (hoje a TV aberta só passa aqueles filmes horrorosos do filho dele), gostei na época e mantive o gosto por ele agora, gosto da pegada insana das personagens os filmes dele, muito fruto de uma improvisação histérica e aqui nesse sentido é um deleite. Box Versátil Cassavetes e a Nova Hollywood.