Husbands and Wives

It's also an ensemble piece acted to loopy perfection by a remarkable cast headed by Judy Davis, Sydney Pollack, Mia Farrow, Juliette Lewis, Liam Neeson and Mr. Allen, who's also the writer, director and ringmaster, as well as his own best friend. Read full review

Allen bravely posits one’s fear of change and the comfort in finiteness. In the end, Husbands and Wives becomes a mirror of false illusions, relentlessly held up by Allen before the faces of anyone who has ever looked for a reason to leave only to sheepishly stay behind. Read full review

Allen has never crafted anything as fiercely funny as this comedy of coming apart; it’s a groundbreaking film, full of sublime performances alert to the violence done in the name of love. Read full review

With excellent performances (Davis and Pollack in particular), it's his finest film since "Hannah and Her Sisters." Read full review

The acting is flawless throughout, with top honors going to Davis, who blazes through the picture with devastating intensity and honesty. It's an urgent, unsettling performance, perfectly complemented by Pollack, who projects quiet ease and authenticity in this, his first major role. Read full review

Despite the presence of a college-aged siren that Allen’s married, fiftysomething character becomes intoxicated with, this assured, penetrating film is no sentimental homage to May-December infatuations. Rather, Husbands and Wives is a lacerating comedy about love turned sour, a painful, deeply pessimistic yet somehow funny look at how caring relationships wind up as destructive emotional dead-ends. Read full review

Carlo Di Palma's intense, smashing, claustrophobic cinematography is terrific: Jarring, moving, and hitting all the hard angles of Upper East Side Manhattan, Di Palma frames a tight picture of woe. As ever, Woody Allen's smear on himself is appropriately smudged with telling musical notes: Cole Porter's "What Is This Thing Called Love" and Mahler's "Symphony No. 9 in D" sound the agony. [26 Aug 1992]

Yet, paradoxically, the fact that almost every line becomes a double entendre confirms the fact that the movie is one of Allen's best. Although Allen, like the character he's playing, may self-destruct, the movie emerges triumphant. It holds us from start to finish - a rueful, ironic, wrenchingly funny study of yet another set of mixed Manhattan doubles dedicated to the belief that there's no marriage or relationship so bad that it can't be traded for - or transformed into - something worse. [18 Sept 1992, p.51]

Yet the sting of truth and insight that Husbands and Wives provides is such a rarity in cinema, even in Allen's movies, that Husbands and Wives emerges a singular achievement, ranking among Allen's best. [18 Sept 1992, p.22]

Allen's best film for some time. As an examination of middle-aged, middle-class Manhattan mores, in fact, it is well nigh unbeatable. [22 Oct 1992, p.6]

This riveting film is a sad coda to one of cinema's most fruitful partnerships. [30 Oct 1992, p.12]

This is definitely his edgiest, rawest work in a good while. Acting is of a very high caliber across the board, but Judy Davis, in a very meaty part compared to her previous walk-on for Allen in “Alice,” is incandescent, revealing a whole new side to her personality that has never surfaced onscreen before. Read full review

What I like best about Husbands and Wives is that for the first time in a long time, Allen seems to be experimenting. Read full review

Woody Allen's comedy Husbands and Wives is set in his familiar New York world of verbal, neurotic achievers, but there's something new in it, a rawness we haven't seen before. It makes you laugh, deeply, and it makes you squirm. Read full review

There's no doubt that the slow disintegration of Allen and Farrow's relationship inspired this work, but that is where the comparisons end. This is not an instance in which art imitates life, as so many have claimed. Here, real life is the stuff of tabloids, while Husbands and Wives comes close to the exquisite stuff of art. Read full review

But what Husbands and Wives argues is that many "rational" relationships are actually not as durable as they seem, because somewhere inside every person is a child crying me! me! me! We say we want the other person to be happy. What we mean is, we want them to be happy with us, just as we are, on our terms. Read full review

The interweaving of the characters is a masterpiece of invention. Husbands and Wives ranks with Allen's best, as mature but darker than "Hannah and Her Sisters." The laughs come not as readily, and snickers of recognition will be epidemic. But whatever happens in the courts, Allen remains the screen's best social commentator. [14 Sept 1992]

And whether or not you think Allen's an irresponsible home-wrecker and/or Farrow's gone round the bend, Husbands and Wives towers above the recent batch of mediocre-to-awful summer movies that were created by people with less-dished private lives. For those of us who aren't directly involved, it's the work that matters. [18 Sept 1992, p.3]

Australian Judy Davis, one of our finest actresses, gives a brilliant comic performance as a bitter spurned woman venting her spleen on a hapless blind date. Sydney Pollack proves surprisingly effective in a brutal scene where he abuses a bimbo. Husbands and Wives dosen't break new ground in arguing that not breaking up is hard to do; it simply raises the debate with a mix of fine writing and tragic real-life parallels. [18 Sept 1992, p.C]

Allen, the schlemiel, has humiliated himself and hurt his family, disillusioned his fans and become a case in point for the GOP, but he has also hit upon an issue that is universally applicable, the stuff of Oprah Winfrey shows and the trend punditry of newsmagazines. Read full review

Excellent performances from Pollack and Davis in particular, make this one of Woody's finest of the 90s. Read full review

For the first time in ages, it seems, there's something in an Allen movie to take home with you. I'm convinced, for instance, my wife will eventually leave me for Liam Neeson. Read full review

Husbands and Wives is a big, spongy ball of therapeutic angst. I hope Woody Allen continues pouring his life into his movies, but next time he’d do well to keep the couch off camera. Read full review

The film's real heart is splitsville Pollack and Davis - he for the comedy his foolhardy fling provides and she for creating a complex character too direct to maintain marital harmony she may well need. It would be heartening if Davis, not scandal, were to be the film's ultimate legacy. Look for her to figure in the year-end supporting actress awards. [18 Sept 1992, p.1D]

The whining reaches new heights in Husbands and Wives, and it was one of the things that bothered me. Another was the over-jerky camera movement as he tried to give the film the look of a documentary but only made it look like a bad home movie. A third was his use of characters looking straight at the camera and talking to an off-screen person, perhaps a psychiatrist. I think that's a phony device. On the other hand, I found more Allen humor along the way than in several of his recent movies, and he kept it brighter than the depressing tone the subject matter would seem to allow. When he didn't whine, Allen was excellent, and so was Sydney Pollack as his friend Jack. [27 Sept 1992, p.6C]

A reasonably effective comedy-drama that squarely fits the usual Allen mold. [18 Sept 1992, p.12]

But much of what happens in Husbands and Wives isn't just stock Woody. It's stock Hollywood, too. [18 Sept 1992, p.G5]

Allen's conception of character is as banal and shallow as ever, but the lively performances of some of his actors—mainly Davis, Pollack, and Juliette Lewis (as a creative writing student of Allen's who has a brief flirtation with him)—and the novelty of the film's style make this more watchable than many of his features. Read full review

All of the film`s female characters are shrill, manipulative and irrational-their only appeal is masochistic. Read full review

Husbands and Wives ultimately reveals itself as an extremely bitter film, with the kind of sour conviction that tries to pass itself off as wisdom. Allen knows how people talk and how they evade really talking. But his jaundiced vision -- as though he just found out that a marriage can't always be like the first month of dating when you're 17, and now he can't believe how crummy it all is -- just makes him seem naive. In the end his perception yields no insight. Old men like young women. Really? [18 Sept 1992, p.C1]