Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This would be the ultimate Donald Trump film. Complete utter sexual, misogynistic, revolting garbage. Though Gazzara, Falk, and Cassevetes have been in many great films and have great screen credits to their names, this is a tremendous black mark on all of their output. It's entirely clear that a real script and decent editor possibly would have helped this film. Watching a 30+ minute drunken bar scene that did not either advance the plot or story only severed to make me feel bad for the one female trying to do her best.Peter Falk line: "I'm an American, I'm from New York." Come on.It's very clear that the actors were asked to improvise way to much and that they're not very good at it. At least by 2016 standards. Blecck.

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.

...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."

Three men (Falk, Cassavettes, and Gazzara) mourn the death of a friend by going on a long-weekend bender, during which they talk about life, experience masculine pleasures, and try to understand the meaning of it all.This was the first Cassavettes movie I've ever seen. I liked it, which was surprising because this is not the sort of movie I'm generally interested in. There's almost no plot to speak of, most of the movie feels improvised (although improvised along certain set themes -- one does feel the heavy hand of the director here and there). It's a slice of life movie that still feels pretty rough and daring; I imagine in 1970, when this came out, people couldn't make hide nor hare of it. Like most movies of this type, the big flaw is structure. The movie takes forever to get going, and doesn't really seem to know when to quit: the last reel, in particular, felt a little long to me. Plus, as I said, there is here and there a sense of a structure being imposed from without: the guys don't just do anything, they do certain set things for "character revelation" sake.The acting, which is the crucial thing in a movie like this, of course, doesn't disappoint. All three men are very believable: they delineate their macho world quite well, with it's romanticism, bathos, insecurities and obnoxiousness. They're similar types of guys, which bothered me a lot at first but upon reflection made a lot of sense, since in real life we tend to be friends with people like us. Still, there are gradations and variations: Falk is inarticulate and sensitive, Gazzara despairing, Cassavettes is fumbling toward some kind of self-recognition. The cinematography is absolutely stunning -- I might have seen a particularly nice print but this took me by surprise. Most of the movie is shot in warm, earthy, romantic tones, which sets the mood of nostalgia and dreams well, I think. Every now and then, though, we get a cold, full-on daytime shot where everyone looks naked and blinking under a frigid sun; it's a good counterpoint.This is an important film by an important director. He'll never be a favorite of mine, but I'll definitely check out other work of his. You'll be doing yourself a favor if you do the same.