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.
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.