JOHN CASSAVETES' Husbands is Middle America waking up to its mortality. It's the last gasp at the other end of the dream when a car, a home and a family are somehow no longer enough. It's running away when you're too old to believe you can start over and too married not to feel guilty about leaving. Personal and nostalgic. Husbands is Middle America's Easy Rider.

At the funeral of a close friend, Gus (Cassavetes), Harry (Ben Gazarra), and Archie (Peter Falk)-the best of country club buddies-suddenly feel death crawling under their neatly suburban tuxedos. And after the service, they find themselves unable to go home because home is where every day reminds you that you're not the professional basketball player you meant to grow up to be. So they set off on a monumental weekend drunk that runs from barroom to men's room, from basketball court to swimming pool. And then Monday morning it starts out as back to work and home. But Harry ends up slapping his wife; Gus, a dentist, can't stand seeing his patients; and Archie was afraid to go home anyway. In a second wave of disgust, they fly to London.

Cassavetes is determined to present here an epic chase of lost opportunities, and in his celebration of friendship, he squeezes the last drop out of all the old good-time virtues. The beginning of the film delights in physicality. There is a long vomit sequence that, for all its sordidness, perfectly expresses the emotions at the end of a two-day drunk. Vomiting is Cassavetes' simple but apt metaphor for twenty years of marriage suddenly become twenty years too much.

There is a preponderance of close-up shots which, with the often grotesque sensuality of the action, reflect in detail the beery, sweaty discomfort of stale drunkenness. And with Cassavetes' improvisational style the actors can give themselves wholeheartedly to this scene of frustration yielding to indulgence. For the first hour jokes are funny, the pace of the action is tolerably fast, and Cassavetes is capturing something of the desperate enthusiasm of a middle-aged bender.

As long as he maintains this joyously aimless style, as long as the three characters are one amorphous, abstract, triple-headed Husband, the film works as an impressionistic comedy. But somewhere around the middle of the film, Cassavetes becomes dissatisfied with mere drunken clownishness, and he tries to turn his film into a psychological drama. He begins to individualize characters. Motives appear. Instead of leaving his statement to a portrait of emotions, he determines to analyze the breakdown of a friendship. Harry is no longer good old Harry but an insecure sadistic paranoid who accuses his friends of talking behind his back. Archie, we find out, is no good in bed. Gus is Long Island suave to the point of obsession.

AS THOUGH we didn't see the emptiness and boredom beneath their smiles before, Cassavetes begins to make everything explicit. Celebration of the sensual turns into contempt. When we should feel pity, we feel disgust. At one point in an English gaming room, Archie finds himself with a repulsively ugly English society woman who won't let him walk away. The scene is utterly gratuitous, and Cassavetes is using the perversely banal to make cheap jokes. To present the underside of bourgeois respectability, he deliberately cultivates the unattractive.

Worse than this, though, is the strain of trying to form a coherent and meaningful plot out of the events. Cassavetes tries to express tension between his characters, but it is a tension they obviously do not feel. The improvisational style does not allow premeditated animosity. It is far better suited to the enthusiastic camaraderie with which the film began.

The second half of the film undermines all that precedes it. When we first saw the characters, they were apparitions floating up from suburbia. There was a beautiful, almost hallucinatory, effect in those early facial close-ups against a blank background. But once past histories and individual psychologies are filled in, the dreamlike quality vanishes. As the film becomes more "rational" and defined, it becomes less moving.

What happens is that Cassavetes tries to make a story out of a jumble of emotions when the jumble of emotions worked fine by itself. And the real problem is that even after he excites our interest in plot, he refuses to change his subjective style. He does not show events but responses to events. There is, for instance, one scene where the three men are at a dice board. The camera focuses on their facial expressions, and we never actually see what happens with the dice. We are, of course, meant to infer actions from character reactions. And this would be a legitimate technique if Cassavetes were not constantly implying some larger, more important, context, some intricate narrative which lies just beyond sight.

As it is, the film trails off into a highly personal vision which we can only appreciate from a distance, as though we were witnessing some enormous in-joke. At one point Gus, trying to impress an English girl, starts speaking French and Italian. When she complains that she doesn't understand what he's saying, he answers, "It's not real to you, but it's real to me." And it is precisely this that explains Cassavetes' attitude toward his audience. He is so determined to uphold some private conception of the honest artist that he treats his audience with a contempt that becomes itself artificial.

He throws out a little bit of sex, and a little bit of plot, and a little bit of pathos, like so many bones to hungry dogs. But he only teases our expectations. He gives us a shell of action and keeps promising that there is something more inside. We began to expect a culmination and there is none. There is only emotion tortured into the shape of story.

Middle-class ennui in a faltering social system is certainly an acceptable subject for a film, and even an imperfect treatment is far better than another commercial exploitation of the revolution. The subject, though, is too vague and ill-defined to be reduced to the microcosm of three lives. In his rambling, understated style, Cassavetes does stumble on moments of revelation-Archie not knowing what to say to his whore, Harry drinking tea in his London illusion, Gus coming home to his crying daughter. But he tries to make a great work out of understatement and understatement resists greatness.

Cassavetes makes the trip to London a critical turning point of middle age, a forced decision between a return to marriage and an escape to illusion. But he senses that the problem is too complex to be resolved. So he skips entirely the scene toward which the whole film has been pointing-the parting of the friends in London-and instead, he concludes with the cheap sentimentality of Gus' reunion with his children. The film then ends with an ambiguity-not the provoking open-endedness of good questions raised, but the nagging sense of an itch left unscratched.