Husbands

1970 "A comedy about life, death and freedom."
7.1| 2h11m| PG-13| en
Details

A common friend's sudden death brings three men, married with children, to reconsider their lives and ultimately leave the country together. But mindless enthusiasm for regained freedom will be short-lived.

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Columbia Pictures

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Reviews

Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!
CommentsXp Best movie ever!
Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.
Phillida Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.
MortalKombatFan1 Cassavetes' Husbands is at times exciting, at times funny, can a bit boring and authentically real in dealing with its three central characters, played by John Cassavetes (Gus), Peter Falk (Archie), and Ben Gazara (Harry).The opening scene where they go to the funeral of their friend - who died in his forties or a heart attack - and their subsequent all day and night drinking binge usually would give us some clear insight into these characters. Typical movies would have one of them state about making up for lost time, and the feeling they have for their lost friend. It sort of happens in the movie, but not stated so obviously. Each of the three men act out on a childish whim, and never really express themselves to each other underneath their male posturing and childish antics. In the bar scene that follows, they get into a drinking game and everyone sings (the wake where everyone shares something positive about the deceased is skipped). After Gazarra's theatrical singing, a woman starts to sing, but is berated by him to sing with more passion. This goes on for a very long time, and then his friends go on to belittle her and bully as well. The scene is prolonged to go from funny to uncomfortable and back again, but our sympathy for the characters never permanently changes.   The reasons why characters act out is never clear in the movie to us, and I don't think to them, either. You cam never tell when the performers are being genuine or playing "roles" around each other. When the three are in the bathroom, throwing up in the stalls, Gazarra shows some vulnerability, but then ends up yelling at his friends, the other two not really listening. He calls them out on acting like children later on, but hypocritically acts that way himself. We don't see Gus' wife in the movie, or Archie's. Harry's wife is divorcing him, and their separation could be the source of his occasionally anguished strife. His fight with his wife and mother in law over wanting to see his kids is raw and earnest, but also a little ridiculous.Most of the scenes follow this trend of muddled uncertainty, which can leave the viewer exhausted from having to be around these three men who seem incapable of articulating themselves without damaging those around them. We don't judge them based on the filmmaker's point of view, we just observe (like a documentary, but without the imposition of trying to tell a story)."Husbands" is a demanding work, but rewarding for the virtuosic acting from the ensemble cast. Just don't expect any resolutions or neatly expressed ideas.
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.
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.
rookshowlin ...along with The Bicycle Thief and the rest of Cassavetes and maybe Decalogue and Harold and Maude and A Time For Drunken Horses and some Bela Tarr (Eightie's "trilogy") and The Celebration and Tender Mercies and you can keep all your Kubrick and other tricksters and pseudo-Hitchcocks (particularly nick, the "chubby, two-faced one"), boys and gals, because there's not enough heart in 'em (Ben Gazzara in Husbands: "From the heart!... From the heart!...)... and, well, on and on and on, but not for too much longer... because that would imply there are that many good films out there... anyway, okay, i would want to grab so many if i had to run and not walk to someplace better (if there is anywhere truly better than another these days, as you can't swing a dead cat without hitting somebody that's either stealing your grill or at least pissing on your coals in this oh so modern world, oh boy, show me your toys!...), say E Street, or perhaps Northern Ireland (if Joyce comes to her senses and stops hating herself so much that she hurts me and Linnea has some time to spare with me and her French fiancé doesn't get all froggy)... BUT i would absolutely take this movie with me, always, wherever i go. and if Criterion doesn't release all the versions of this film soon I am going to literally explode like a Spinal Tap drummer (i might take that one, too, that's why i bring it up so "sophomorically")... HUSBANDS. "a masterful work of art, i think," said Seymour Cassel - but i don't need to say "i think."