evening1 Three buddies going way back adjust to the sudden death, by heart attack, of a fourth, and it ain't pretty. "People die of tensions -- that's all they die of," opines the earthy character played by Peter Falk, and we wish to hear more of his speaking from the heart. However, members of this macho, posturing triumverate hardly mention their departed friend at all. Instead, we observe all manner of acting out, from drinking too much, yelling at each other and at women, acting impulsively, throwing money around, and being unpredictable. "At 27, men realize they are not going to be a professional athlete," one of the buddies says along the way. "You reach 30 and realize it's over." Er, OK. For the rest of the movie, we watch these boy-men try to forget that time stops for no tide. Many of the principals and tangential characters giggle uncontrollably -- not that anything is very funny here -- and one wonders if usually creative director John Cassavetes, famous for his cinema-verite style of filmmaking, is stalling for time, trying to figure out what should come next. The three main characters, played by Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Falk, look a lot alike, especially at the beginning, and it's hard for a while to keep the characters straight. One thing is clear, though, and that is that the men are lost, lost, lost. On the outside they look like professionally successful family men. At a closer glance, we see that they are deeply alienated, and completely incapable of having an authentic interaction with another human being. The unseen tragedy of their friend's passing causes them to question everything -- to the point of going to bed with none-too-appealing strangers in London -- and when the shock subsides, things go back almost to the way they were before. A pretty sorry picture of American domesticity.

treywillwest I'm tempted to review this as two different movies, not because the film's different acts don't flow into each other naturally, but simply because the first third of the film is, I think, so superior to the rest. The first forty minutes or so of Husbands (of the shortened version currently available on DVD in the US) is as fine, if not better, than anything else Cassavetes ever made. The funeral sequence and that at the pub with the singing of songs, is brilliant cinema. The shadow of death and loss is palpable, and the sense of drunken overcompensation can be felt by anyone who has ever, well, overcompensated through drinking. I do not think of Cassavetes as a great visual filmmaker, but some of the compositions in the bar room scene made me think of Rembrandt, with its dark hues giving way to such revealing faces. That these heads are confronted with, what in the composition amount to, disembodied hands makes this seem like Rembrandt in the age of surrealism. Regrettably, after these magical 40 or so minutes, the film then degenerates into all that I think worst about Cassavetes's oeuvre. The crudest male bonding is celebrated as liberational. Indeed, one of the most grotesque of patriarchal tropes gets wheeled out: the woman who gets abused by a man and then falls in love with her attacker. (That the perpetrator is played by Cassavetes himself makes this seem all the more off-putting.) The last couple of scenes are a memorably bleak portrayal of American suburbia, but this is compromised by the fact that we are only allowed to identify with the supposedly "put-upon" masters of this world: the white patriarchy.

ElMaruecan82 Confusing? Irritating? Nonsensical? You name them … any epithetic word would perfectly fit to describe Cassavetes' "Husbands", probably the film that most divided the critics. Indeed, this is such an incredible challenge for personal appreciation, you must convince yourself that the truth is elsewhere in order to appreciate the beauty of "Husbands", you must forget that this film belongs to cinema, which is its finest irony. But believe me, it works … As soon as you stop noticing that these men are actors, that their dialogs are scripted, that this film has a message, you start to reach its innate greatness. It's a strange approach and I can understand that it would leave many viewers with mixed feelings. I respect that. It's probably one of the few movies I wouldn't even try to convince a hater because I so understand this reaction, but if this review may change one minds or two, well, it's worth trying. This is the least I could do.In fact, those who're familiar with Cassavetes' work would get the idea of not judging his films on a cinematic basis. One of Cassavetes' most recognizable trademarks was cinema-verité: the happening, showing characters in constant movement, through unpredictable behaviors as to sustain the idea of the total randomness of life. What was taken for improvisation was much more an immersion into the true face of reality that lets us spontaneously communicate. That's one of the many characteristics that enrich Cassavetes' universe. Another one is the absence of plot, because basically, no one is plotting in the original meaning of the word. No one is calculating, or predicting one specific reaction, people behave according to the feelings of the moment, unaware of the consequences. Cassavetes is the quintessential film-maker of the present.But still, most of his movies looked and sounded like 'telling a story'. "Husbands" works differently, as the movie doesn't give any clue where it's going, and at the end, you realize it went nowhere; it's the most Cassavetian Cassavetes' film, which explains why it's the most misunderstood by the haters, and the most praised (sometimes exaggeratedly, I concede) by the fans. It's anarchic, chaotic, frustrating and even embarrassing but the point is not to ask yourself where this movie goes, but where you would go with this movie. In other words, think about all the flaws and ask yourself if you never had the feeling that your life was exactly like Cassavetes portrayed it in "Husbands". If you say 'no', you're too 'strong' to be human.Yes, "Husbands" is not about super men, but about men so ordinary they try for once, to make their lives extraordinary. It's quite interesting that the pivotal point was the death of their friend, because I've always considered that the three keys of lucidity were: encountering death, being angry, and … post-coital moments. At these three moments, life appears to you in its darkest or boldest clothes, those of nudity, and you can't help but question your own condition. In "Husbands" , John Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara face these situations. They definitely don't know how to behave because lucidity can inspire the craziest decisions: leaving the house for two days, going on a trip to London, playing in the Casino or getting girls in a hotel room.It's a movie about men wanting to be men, with this conqueror's instinct. Life for us, men, as a perpetual dilemma because our nature and culture dictate so many codes only to label us as the oppressors, the tormentors of poor weaker women. "Husbands" is the chronicles of a revenge by men. Men who are so men, or so mean, they try but fail to assess their manhood, because there's already a sense of bitter failure when you try to prove to your buddies or to yourself that you still 'got it'. Despite the melancholic undertones of the film, the mood is still noisily cheerful made of singing, dancing, chuckling, shouting and abrupt outburst of craziness combined with long moments of self-introspections, like a succession of drunken orgies followed by immediate hangovers.I can see how "Husbands", by such a clear title, and a macho almost masochistic portrayal of men, can offend women, who are depicted here only as objects of conquest and necessary domination. I'm thinking of Peter Falk's character for instance, so unsure with his sexual abilities, he needed to overpower a woman in bed, and rejected her when even well-intentionally, she got on the top. Cassavetes was the most exasperating since you never exactly knew what his intentions were with his two-sided role: the seducer and the rejecter. And Ben Gazzara was absorbed by his manly charisma, only to hide the torture of a meaningless life preventing him from behaving naturally. They have their issues more than any characters, they're hardly likable, but they do touch something very deep in our manly hearts.Cassavete's film becomes a masterpiece if you take it as a self-reflexive approach on men's middle-age crisis. The whole range of emotions portrayed in this film is precisely the embodiment of the confusion that can torture men, and the film couldn't have authentically portrayed them in a well-constructed way. The direction, the script are deliberately abrupt and clumsy because it's about men and men are like this … Cassavetes is the film-maker of truth, and this is his truest film, a film about friends, with a complicity that transcended the context of the film. And maybe fans have a soft spot for "Husbands"' because it's the only one to reunite the three Cassavetian leading men, I guess Seymour Cassel was too young for the part …"Husbands" is like these masterpieces victim of their own greatness, like "2001: A Space Odyssey", movies so good, they wouldn't have been as memorable had they respected movie's entertainment conventions, and Cassavetes made a style out of unconventionality.

jzappa The very first bit of dialogue is the kind of introductory exposition you get and gradually learn the rhythm of from a movie that is testing you. Being a film by John Cassavetes, it shall be one of those films that leaves you unsure of what to think of it at all, except that you were strangely engrossed in many scenes, only not quite like other examples of this sort of movie experience. His sense of pace is epic, but the subjects that fascinate him are granular in scale. 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.The dialogue is comprised of unfinished thoughts, of knee-jerk shouts, not to mention three actors with egos more massive than the movie's gaps of seeming inertia. The camera just rolls and the microphone just hears. That we're seeing and hearing anything in particular is not as central as the fact that we are indeed looking and listening.Cassavetes tries so hard to seize and squeeze every possibility of any moments that catch what we all know happens between concept and execution. Moments that don't seem scriptable, that hardly seem describable. When we're with somebody but before anyone's thought of anything to say, or when we are distracted into an unthinking transition, anything impulsive or seemingly without thought. I might even go so far as to say the whole film seems involuntary. And what's more, it is predominantly comprised of Cassavetes' trademark scenes of agonizing discomfort.The most emboldened stand-out in this film's succession of scenes of that nature is an inordinately long one in which Cassavetes, Gazzara and Falk sit with a table of friends and family in a bar, not a tissue of their body left dry of alcohol, taking random turns singing traditional folk songs, and after awhile---and I mean awhile---one person begins singing, and the three jeer them into silence, then tell her to try again. They jeer her quiet again, and again and again and again until finally, after anyone in her position would still be cooperating, they praise her for finally getting it right. This to me represents what has to be the creative process for actors in a Cassavetes film, especially the Cassavetes film Husbands. There seems to be no frontal lobe left in any actor.Husbands is described sometimes as a comedy. Well, I don't know if it's a comedy, but is a drama with sporadic moments of strange, seemingly incidental humor. There is an unusually brief scene where Gazzara visits his office and is greeted by an outlandishly goofy colleague. When the three friends are electrified with excitement about going to London, we cut to London, where it's dreary and pouring rain. There doesn't seem to be a way to pinpoint the nature of the movie's tone, or its structure at all. Like I said, it puts you to the test, and the test is to accept the film on its terms. If you do, you can be moved by the nature of its point of view and be open to the nature of your own reactions to it.