Product Details

• Actors: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Sydney Pollack, Judy Davis, Juliette Lewis
• Directors: Woody Allen
• Writers: Woody Allen
• Producers: Charles H. Joffe, Helen Robin, Jack Rollins, Joseph Hartwick, Robert Greenhut
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Sony Pictures
• VHS Release Date: June 23, 1994
• Run Time: 108 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302697042
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #204,308 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

In 1992, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow--heretofore the Lunt and Fontanne of Hollywood on the Hudson--went public with a media-saturated battle over Allen's affair with Farrow's adopted daughter. Only a few months later, Allen released this film, starring himself and Farrow acting out a virtually identical plot line: an unhappy marriage begins to crumble when the husband strays with a much younger woman (in this case, one of his students, played by Juliette Lewis). It turned out to be one of Allen's most lacerating comedies, a story about the fragility of relationships and the foolishness of older men seeking to recapture their youth with younger women. It features strong performances by Judy Davis, Liam Neeson, and director Sydney Pollack, as a friend of Allen's who chucks his longtime wife for an aerobics instructor, thus planting seeds of marital dissolution in all of his friends' heads. Husbands and Wives provided an uncanny peek into Allen's image of himself and his personal life, despite all of his protestations to the contrary. --Marshall Fine

From The New Yorker

Woody Allen's uncomfortably personal new movie renders the dissolution of a marriage in a style that's meant to look raw, rough-edged, truthful. He uses jump-cutting and wobbly hand-held camerawork to create the illusion of immediacy, of lifelike spontaneity and muddle. But the movie's vision of life isn't really very persuasive, and Allen isn't saying anything that he hasn't said before. The only thing that has changed since his late-seventies explorations of romantic futility (such as "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan") is the tone, which is now sour, dispirited, almost vindictive. The cinéma-vérité surface feels like a con, a razzle-dazzle cover for imaginative exhaustion. Both the style and the substance of this picture have a curdled quality, the air of things that have gone bad but haven't been thrown away. Except for Judy Davis's ebullient performance as a friend of the central couple, Gabe and Judy Roth (Allen and Mia Farrow), the movie's humor is surprisingly flat. Allen's gags and situations no longer betray even a trace of delight at the absurdities of human behavior: his bemused vision of romantic folly has turned, over the years, into a bilious take-my-wife-please routine. It's tempting to think of this bleakly nihilistic film as an expression of its creator's weariness with his own ideas. The most disturbing, and angering, thing about the picture is that Allen has transformed his disappointment in himself into disgust for other people: he's going down, and he's determined to take the rest of us with him. Also with Liam Neeson, Juliette Lewis, Sydney Pollack, Lysette Anthony, and Benno Schmidt. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Woody's Masterpiece., February 20, 2005

By 

Bernard Chapin "Ora Et Labora!" (CHICAGO! USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Husbands and Wives (DVD)

I have been a major Woody Allen fanatic since I was 10 years old, but only now, after my third viewing of "Husbands and Wives" did I fully comprehend the importance of this film within his oeuvre. It's home movie feel and documentary style provide subtle integrity for its frames. The acting and the characterization are superb. This may be the best cast he ever assembled with producer, and non-actor, Sydney Pollack even putting forth a remarkable performance. The audience will care about all of the players and wonder exactly what will happen in the end.

Allen denied repeatedly that "Husbands and Wives" was autobiographical but it would be impossible for it not to have been given the events of his life. Here we see him play a writer who, just like Allen, is cherished by fans for his "funnier early works." One wonders whether his affair with Soon-Yi had begun at the time of its production and what exactly his interactions with Farrow were like.

Allen was clearly working through many of his own personal dilemmas and that is exactly why the film is so authentic and believable. It will touch in some way most who see it as sometimes life really does imitate art.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wince and Love It, July 8, 2004

By 

Mary C. Dubrock (Paducah, KY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Husbands and Wives (DVD)

Never has a movie about relationships hit so many nerves on so many levels. It takes guts to view this film with an open mind. I takes familiarity with relational boredom and heartache to understand it completely.

Woody Allen delves into the minds and dysfunctional lives of two and then four couples with the deftness of a ninja in "Husbands and Wives." Rarely have I seen such candor in depiction of the seven year itch. It is a place in time that will be familiar to many couples given the opportunity for honesty and will likely create interesting if not brutal debate in the most secure of unions.

The hand held camera used in many of the scenes are not for those prone to motion sickness. Nonetheless, it creates an intimacy and urgency that grant the film credence at its most passionate moments.

Each of the characters is someone that the viewer probably knows in situations that they would never discuss, leaving him both baffled and sympathetic.

I highly recommend the film to those viewers able to be honest enough and possibly brave enough to face their most intimate relational demons.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Woody puts the "Fun" in dysFUNctional, June 10, 2002

By 

Elderbear (Loma Linda, Aztlan) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Husbands and Wives (DVD)

He's not happy with her, their friends aren't happy with each other, the friends break up, he flinging with his aerobics instructor, she, trying to indulge in an editor, while everybody self-consciously tells the viewers what they will not tell their (ex-)spouses. We see manipulation posing as truth, vulnerable facades imitating intimacy, lust mimicking passion, and discover, in the end, that perhaps the only true desire in a Woody Allen movie is to dodge happiness & to take pleasure in the misery of knowing that it probably wouldn't have worked out anyhow.

Confused yet?

I can't imagine anybody still in the "honeymoon" stage of a First Great Love appreciating this movie. For those scarred by years of relationship campaigning, much of Allen's view may ring all-too-true. I won't say how many times I saw myself, my wife, and ex-lovers plastered against the screen.

Throughout the movie, individuals and couples long for intimacy, for lasting passion, for refreshment, but end up settling for comfort, manipulation, and denial. I wanted to scream. I hoped, hopelessly, for hope--this is, after all, a Woody Allen Movie--but was left, in the end, with Gabriel (literally "God's Hero") telling viewers that love, romance, and passion can only exist as a neurotic and fleeting figment of experience.

Damned if I'm willing to settle for that. And perhaps that's the great strength of this movie. It could, after all, be a satire, not about mid-life-crisis-men seeking youth through young lovers, but showing, in the crassest relief, how barriers and little deceits ultimately lead to destruction and misery in relationships. And maybe that's where the hope lies, in learning to be honest in a way that none of Allen's characters can be, not even with themselves.

(If you'd like to discuss this review or DVD in more depths, please click the "about me" link above and drop me an email. Thanks!)