Husbands is a survey of the male midlife crisis as depicted by three friends who abandon home, country,
responsibility, civility, and sanity when confronted with their own mortalities in the wake of a beloved friend’s death.

It cannot be overstated how alienating this experience was for me, a woman. Seeing John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk traipse about New York City and London in madcap fashion on the hunt for booze and cooze wasn’t exactly an unfamiliar antic in the tropes of film (or in the lives of ordinary people), but it was the potency of their iniquities that induced in me at turns woeful embarrassment, anxious alarm, putrid disgust, rankled confusion, tearful shame, and vacant hollowness. They show…

"Well I'm not going home; I'm going to get very drunk."

Methinks the title for John Cassavetes' fifth feature Husbands might be a little ironic. The private world of three married professional men (played by Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Cassavetes) is suddenly destabilized by the death of a fourth friend, intimated to be the linchpin of their tight social circle. The remaining trio appear deeply stung by the superficial vacuity of the funeral service, though one may reasonably assume that their collective pique actually has more to do with the precipitous intrusion of mortality upon the psyches of these trim, middle-class suburbanites. Enmeshed between unprocessed grief and unexamined codes of atavistic masculinity, the bereaved husbands impulsively decide that a…

"Besides sex, I like you guys better" - Harry,

Guys are a mess.

Husbands is a film about 3 men who leave their families and realize freedom isn't as fulfilling as they expected it to be. It's an amazing film that I had problems with because I couldn't get past the characters. What John Cassavetes produces and gets out of Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk is some of the most real and impactful group acting I've ever seen in a film. The cinematography is beautiful and the camera work is fantastic. I liked the pacing for the most part although the ending feels a bit long (perhaps because the ending is so cringy). I like the film, I just didn't…

Feels less like a film and more like a sociological examination of male relationships - the relationships men have with women, the relationships men have with each other, and the relationships that men have with themself. These men are fundamentally unable to sincerely communicate grief to each other, unable to sincerely communicate their guilt and sadness, they can barely understand the world around them - not even their wives and families - because of how deeply they understand each other. They’ve created their own language of communicating with each other - through joking, through drinking, through aggression - but rarely if ever through genuine expression.

The scenes in the hotel room, in which each of the men is paired off…

"I got a hell of an idea. Let's have a light breakfast."

A torturous and unrelenting deconstruction of masculinity and its expectations in a group of middle-aged men who want to escape their lives following the death of their friend. They haven't slowed down and all their energy has to go somewhere, but it doesn't go to their wives or children; it stays between them and their friendship; which, when they're not clowning in the street or shoving each other (or perhaps then, too) is warm, tender, and vulnerable. Yet there's the pain of wanting to be intimate and communicate feelings, especially of guilt and grief. "At first, there were four of us, and now there are three of us,…