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Husbands
(1970)
Dir: John Cassavetes
This is a film about guys, about how silly and petty and insecure and contradictory and awesome men can be. This is typical Cassavetes, with very little in the way of traditional plot or character development. Scenes wind along for ten, sometimes fifteen minutes at a time, conversations overlap and the tone abruptly shifts from drunken nonsense to sincere pathos. The characters are impossible to define; they're absolute bastards one minute and scared, sympathetic little boys the next. Oh, and they love getting trashed–I mean silly, obnoxious, fall down drunk. Almost every scene in this 140 minute film finds the men either completely wasted or on their way.
When a close friend dies, good friends Gus (Cassavetes), Archie (Peter Falk), and Harry (Ben Gazarra) do what a lot of men would do: they get drunk and wrestle. After the funeral services the men set out on an extended bender where they drink, play basketball, sing, pound beers, wrestle in the street, tease one another, drink some more and finally puke their brains out, in what has to be one of the most painfully accurate scenes depicting male grief.
At Harry’s suggestion the men decide to spontaneously fly off to London where they continue their decadence by picking up three women and taking them back to their hotel room. They drink some more, laugh, bicker, and cheat on their wives, before coming to the inevitable realization that, while none of them really want to, they must return to their middle-class suburban lives and the families they obviously love.
Husbands perfectly exemplifies why feminists despised Cassavetes' body of work. The men are often incredibly harsh towards women, and in typical Cassavetes fashion he refuses to pull any punches in his depiction of their turbulent and sometimes violent domestic lives (in one scene Harry actually slaps his wife and threatens to kill her before running off to drink with the boys). What was often misunderstood as misogyny was really just Cassavetes' attempt to portray life as it's really lived. There are no villains in the film, and just when one of the characters does something reprehensible, Cassavetes offers a possible explanation for their actions.
This film–more than any other–comes closest to illustrating what Cassavetes the person was probably like. He had the potential to be a total asshole and a loyal friend and husband, and he made it clear in his films that most of us are the same way. After two and a half hours we know little more about these characters than when the film began, and it seems the characters don't know much more about themselves either. This is probably what Cassavetes intended. All that’s clear is that their friend is still dead and their lives will continue on. That, and they've all got a lot of explaining to do. In the final scene, Gus returns home to his children who play in the front yard. His son, played by Cassavetes real life son, Nick, yells to his mother inside, “Mom! Dad’s home!” then turns to his father and says with total seriousness, "Boy are you in trouble."
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