The greatest movie ever made..!

How sad is this?

Better Late Then Never

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

First of all - enough with the trivializing "oh, of course a woman in this situation would go crazy". Mabel is mentally ill. Mental illness had more of a stigma in 1974 than 40+ years later, yet that doesn't diminish the impact of the movie or accolades of Rowlands' masterful performance. We respect Mabel for who she is - we sympathize with her. The strong performances of Rowland and Falk make for an engrossing film.The camera sits there and lets the scene happen, and what comes out is a gritty, realistic-looking piece of cinematographic history.

Around half its time, this movie is as pleasant and entertaining as watching an unedited tape from a psychiatric ward. Gena Rowlands does deliver a very good performance and Peter Falk also does a good job. But what about the rest that constitutes as a movie?Yelling, yelling, yelling. And some more yelling plus slapping in the face. Little to no action. For 15 minutes we are forced to watch actors eating a meal. That's right, that is what that scene near the beginning is all about: the cast is just eating, cameras rolling, script not existing. It is just an improvisation with a little editing done afterwards, with totally boring end effect. And something similar is repeated at the end: they are just cleaning the table for four minutes. How fascinating and mind openingThere is almost no musical score; which is always a risky move, because it makes the movie more realistic but at the cost of being less appealing to the audience. So on the one hand, we have a "realism of no music". But on the other, we have a scene with a rope at the dig site: one of the characters (while being angry) manipulates (probably without bad intentions) the rope, while other character uses it at the same time to go down a slippery hill; and falls down. At there are two problem with this event. The first one: there would be no way to manipulate the rope with such ease (especially with one hand), because of the weight of that (fallen) character. The second one: the issue of perpetrating the accident is later on never addressed by authorities or even the rest of the work crew. So that is quite unrealistic roll of events. And so, a mixture like that just makes you think of the whole movie as a chaotic endeavor; a movie with modus operandi of "My name is John Famous-Actor-Slash-Independent-Director Cassavetes and I am taking a serious subject of mental illness, but I do not care about the rest, because I have already used up seriousness on being an self funded independent director". And on the technical side of this picture there are problems with bad lighting and bigger problems with even worst soundThis movie is so boring and hard to digest, that unless you are a film (or medicine) student, you should not approach it

Gena Rowlands is cast as the woman under the influence of some undefined mental disorder. Her acting is superb; when the camera is in a close-up of her face, her chops are just better than anything I have seen. Her facial gestures, the eyes, furrowing of the brows, nose twitching, everything - is the best I have seen in an actor portraying emotions and thoughts without having to say too much. Wow.In my opinion, it was her husband, Nick (Peter Falk) who was the one who needed to be put away. He portrayed a man who was angry, and he was angry and violent throughout the movie, for the most part. Poor Mabel (Rowlands), she was at the mercy of his anger and emotionally did what she had to do to cope.But this was a different era; it was shown, through Cassavetes' writing and direction, that it was acceptable then, in some American blue-collar homes, to slap women around, threaten people, give children alcohol, as long as it was the man of the house doing it.How times have changed, and it was through movies like this, where bizarre social behavior that was on the borderline of acceptable in that era, may have been a catalyst for the audience to examine their own emotions and mores.

With this, Cassavetes joins my list of cinematic masters who evoke a transcendent humanity, next to maybe six more. This is rare praise from me. The man cuts deep, and in progressively deeper ways which I'm going to note here, extending a discussion that began in previous comments.The easy thing to say is that it's an emotionally shattering movie, as visceral as any of the films on madness, better in fact. There had been many good films in this niche prior of course. If you want detailed visual metaphor for the woman's situation, you'll find a great set in Red Desert. A more angsty one in Through Glass Darkly, together with harrowing emotion and Protestant guilt. Repulsion has the more eye- grabbing hallucination.Then of course is what many reviewers mention when talking about Cassavetes. Usually dubbed as realism, it is the lasting impact of lived experience, the intense focus on the moment-at-hand. You live through a Cassavetes film and all that. Work for some, transcendent for others. But you can read about that elsewhere, here I want to leverage a somewhat different set of notions which I think reveal a deeper genius at play.The Cassavetes effect is something I have not encountered anywhere else.See, it is not just the tethering to moment or the undefined horizon. Ozu had done this, Antonioni and others. Altman was trying at this time. Marienbad was fully an evocation of trying to define horizons. A small advance in what Cassavetes does is an extreme fixation to moment. Remarkable in itself, but in the long stretch it would achieve nothing but nihilism. Buddhists, whose main area of expertise is exactly an awareness of emptiness, what is usually transferred in the West as 'being in the moment', caution against single-minded fixation on fixation. It's one of the most tiresome things I know in my own meditation, trying to be in the moment.Cassavetes is similarly exhaustive up until a point.Confining our gaze may prove so suffocating some viewers will want out, that's the gamble: the reward can only be apparent in retrospect. During my first watch of Husbands, I was exasperated and ready to write him off, that is until a certain point. But it matters that we work to stay tethered to that moment-at-hand, mirroring the husband's commitment to his loved one, the commitment to departing friends in Husbands, to forging a relationship in Minnie and so on. It matters that we stay in that space, investing of ourselves.Within that space is the lovely Rowlands, as much an auteur in that space as Cassavetes is of the overall film. Her performance here tops any of Brando's in improvised creation of the situations. Without a horizon herself, Cassavetes would famously refuse directions during the shoot, she throws herself in aching, innocent, calligraphic madness. It is the shyness of wanting to please and be a part of others but not knowing which parts of you to bare in what time, the most touching ordeal. An actress unsure of the extent of her performance. Implicitly, she seems to know the scenes with music (starting with the black coworker who breaks into tenor song over dinner) are partly hallucinated by her character, and knows they are not necessarily not happening. Hence, the confusion and hesitated reaction.And then she goes away.This is where the movie starts, very slowly. So far it has all been preparation, fixing the mind for meditation. As in previous films, this narrative shift creates desire, lack, expectation, human horizon. In Husbands it was the trip to London, in Minnie the proposal. It's a masterful effect at work, so risky because he leaves it completely up to the viewer to stay tethered. Masterful because it asks of us to discover the character as her close ones have known her since before everything, before the anger, confusion and labels—not mad, wife or mother, just the sweet face you've tied your life to.Now we want to see her back, see how she is, like her husband and children do. And because we haven't had any distractions leading up to the shift, no subplots, music, montage or visual flow to break the concentration, it registers in a tremendous way. Lesser films would discuss memory, here we're made to have memories—but if and only if we have been patient in the knowing. I haven't seen anything like this until the recent crop of Asian films like 2046 and Syndromes and a Century, and there without one tenth of the livingness achieved here.Is that how it ends though?No, and here is the deeper genius for me. This may be the most heartwarming film I've seen for just the last scene, a wholly new glimpse as the couple tidy up their place, alone at last, safe, calm in each other's presence. And then it ends. Another shift and horizon, this time to who these people are away from all the public crap of life. And how poignant? Love as quietly taking care of the same house together.As in previous films, we have presence in the moment, presence over time, the shift to horizon, and second shift in the end. Fixing the mind to one place then releasing so you hover over the world, awareness rippling outwards. This may be the closest to meditation any filmmaker has come, and I'm usually a stickler about this. Oh, it remains work, but the cumulative world built over the course of several films has never been equaled in cinema for my taste.Something to meditate upon.