Husbands (1970), a film about three middle-aged men dealing with the sudden death of their close friend, is a work that masquerades as a searing exploration of male anxiety and the absurdities of life but, in practice, feels more like a drawn-out, self-indulgent existential crisis played out on celluloid. It’s not that the film’s examination of male friendship, grief, and the absurdity of existence is unimportant or irrelevant—it’s just that Husbands fancies itself much more profound than it actually is. It’s Seinfeld, but if George Costanza had a midlife crisis and just kept yelling “I’m nothing!” for 2 hours and 20 minutes, and instead of hilarious absurdity, you’re left with a bitter aftertaste of “Well, I’m sorry, but we can’t all be Niels Bohr.”

The film, directed by John Cassavetes (who also stars in it), has long been heralded as a kind of post-Vietnam, post-’60s, post-“I’m a Man!” meditation on the superficiality and fear of male existence, specifically the fragility of masculinity when faced with the cold, uncaring machinery of death. Which sounds like it could be an interesting exploration, right? After all, who doesn’t want to watch a few guys grapple with their own impotence in the face of their own mortality? But what Husbands often overlooks—or perhaps, more accurately, pretends to overlook—is that by throwing its characters into a floundering, seemingly aimless search for meaning, it never stops to wonder whether its approach to finding meaning is meaningful at all. The men are ostensibly trying to deal with their loss, but all they end up doing is getting drunk, finding themselves in random bar fights, and trading trite aphorisms about life and death that, at best, read like quotes from the Dude’s Guide to Existential Crisis.

The central trio of characters—Cassavetes’s character, along with Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk—are presented as avatars of a certain brand of existential despair, but the real question is: Do these men actually grapple with any of their deeper issues, or do they just shuffle from one chaotic, ill-considered escapade to the next because it's more comfortable than confronting their own fears of meaninglessness? Their response to grief—their whole reaction to the death of their friend—is not so much an exploration of loss as it is a painfully extended tantrum, a collective refusal to acknowledge their discomfort with the idea that life just is (meaningless, that is). They spend hours upon hours acting out their despair in the most performative way possible: laughing too loudly at bad jokes, drinking too much at shitty bars, slapping each other around like overgrown children because they’re not quite able to admit that they’re terrified by the idea that one day they’ll simply disappear from the earth and no one will notice.

This is where Cassavetes’s style—so raw and in-your-face in Faces (1968)—begins to lose some of its initial shock value. Yes, we get it: they’re men, they’re broken, they’re hurt. But it’s the type of emotional rawness that feels a little too self-conscious, as if the film is constantly reminding us, “Hey, look how raw we’re being here! Look how unpolished! We’re really confronting life’s meaninglessness head-on!” But the entire thing starts to feel like a performance for an audience that doesn’t actually need to be convinced of how absurd it is to be human. By the third or fourth bar brawl or ill-advised romp through the streets of New York, it becomes evident that the movie’s real genius lies not in its characters’ search for meaning but in its dazzling ability to simulate the existential despair of men who are so convinced of their own self-importance that they’re unwilling to realize that their behavior is just another form of escapism. It’s as if the film itself is too busy performing its own existential weight to ever really feel it.

And yet, the very premise of Husbands—these three men, each in the throes of personal confusion after their friend's death—is undeniably compelling. The problem is that while they are ostensibly the main characters, their existential torment is reduced to a series of contrived, repetitive exchanges that mostly serve to reinforce their own misogynistic assumptions and their belief in their own incapacity to grow. These men act out their frustrations with each other in the most juvenile ways possible—grabbing each other’s faces, shouting about how life is nothing, acting like they’re the first people in history to be confronted with the futility of existence. There’s no real dialogue, no nuanced development. Instead, we’re given stilted, grim scenes that move in and out of long takes like some kind of performative theater. It’s as if Cassavetes is telling us, "See how difficult this is? See how hard it is to be a man in a world that’s given up meaning?" And it would be fine if we were being presented with a fully realized vision of this internal collapse, but what we get instead is a flurry of ad hoc, pseudo-philosophical posturing.

And that’s where the true problem lies, isn’t it? Husbands acts like it’s breaking new ground in its portrayal of male crisis, but all it really does is pull the old, tired trope of the broken man out of the box, dust it off, and pretend it’s some kind of shocking revelation. In the end, the film’s nihilism isn’t revolutionary; it’s just banal. It’s a litany of exhausted gestures toward depth, the same ones we’ve seen in a thousand films about masculinity’s disintegration. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a man pacing in front of a mirror, screaming “What does it all mean?!” and then not bothering to look for the answer. And we, the audience, are left watching the spectacle—waiting for some sign that this was all leading somewhere. But in the end, all we’re left with is the bitter realization that the film doesn’t really care about its own answers. It’s a crisis of meaning that’s content to just look like it’s having one. It’s a film that wears its existential despair like a badge of honor, while never quite confronting the truth: That sometimes, the most profound thing you can do is stop performing your crisis and actually live.