Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. 1974. The fourth film.
It’s going to be a little hard for me to write about this movie I think. It’s one I’ve seen over and over so it’s a little difficult to step back and write about it as a film and not just list the things I love about it.
In the context of this project, it’s certainly very different from Mean Streets, more of a character study and with few of the obvious stylistic trademarks Scorsese is known for (however, there are more subtle elements at work, such as the seemingly effortless way he’ll film a scene with a lot of characters bustling about, with a lot of shifting focus points, with a single shot. or the way he uses source music to illustrate the feel of a location). But mostly, as I talked about in the Mean Streets review, the strongest Scorsese indicator here is the dialogue, which feels honest and sharp at the same time. The reason I watch this movie over and over is because the unforgettable Ellen Burstyn’s Alice makes every scene an incredible delight, thanks to the charming and often hilarious back-and-forth between her and her son, or her and her friends and boyfriends.
Alice Hyatt is a 35-year-old housewife who is clearly unhappy in her marriage. Her husband doesn’t seem to care about her and screams at their intelligent but spoiled son so loudly and often that the neighbors are worried. In a lesser film that sentence would describe the situation completely, but compassionate takes on a character are always more interesting and more real. There is a simple scene where Alice starts to cry in her bed and her husband, who up until this point had been a cardboard cutout of a shitty husband, says nothing but simply embraces her, and we can see that he is crying as well. He hates himself as much as she hates him. Sometimes good people become unhappy, and make everyone else they used to love unhappy as well. We still want Alice to leave him, but he feels like a person, not simply an obstacle.
What’s also nice about those early scenes is we get a strong sense of who Alice is, and we have reason to like her beyond the fact that she is a put-upon woman in a bad situation. Often, having sad or bad things happen to a character is used as a shorthand for actual development. But we see Alice’s personality through this troubling time. She’s funny and smart, and has a strong relationship with her son. She still treats him like a mother but teases him and jokes around like they’re old friends. You get a sense that they understand each other in a way that few others do. When her husband won’t have a conversation with her she begins to have a conversation with herself, mimicking his lumbering accent with hilarious gusto. She’s clever but unsure, and sounds like a grown woman with a good head on her shoulders one minute, and a polite but insecure little girl the next. We know she’s much more than she believes herself to be, and we just want things to go okay for her. So does she.
This all happens in the first twenty or so minutes in the movie, after which her husband is promptly killed in a car accident, and Alice decides to move to Monterey and be a singer, which is what she wanted to do before she got married. She doesn’t make a change for herself just yet, she finds it thrust upon her. She’s not ready to make a strong decision, not ready to embrace her own dreams or insist on what she wants. But she sets off anyway with her son and not much of a plan, because what else is she going to do?
This is where most of the movie is, and the meat of it are simple scenes of dialogue between Alice, her son, and the people she meets along the way. It becomes clearer and clearer that she is allowing life to let her ricochet around, but at the same time, we so how difficult it is for her to start again with no money, a bored and slightly maladjusted 11-year old son, and the constant worry that she’s too old to be doing this alone. In her position, anyone else would ricochet around too.
It’s a somewhat episodic movie. It moves at a fast clip, but lingers long enough to give you a feel of an environment or an incidental character or a scene. Part of the reason this movie is so strong is that there isn’t a single supporting character that disappoints. Harvey Keitel, who was such a nice and moral young man in Mean Streets, as a charming but dangerous boy who can’t take no for an answer. Murray Moston as a slow-moving, world-weary but ultimately kind bar owner. And of course the entire cast of the diner where Alice ends up (on which the shitty sitcom Alice was based). Diane Ladd as Flo, the foul-mouthed waitress who unexpectedly becomes Alice’s truest companion, and Vera who is hilariously quiet and strange, and interrupts scenes to dourly make unrelated observations like “It feels like fall today.”
And of course there’s Kris Kristofferson as the man Alice falls for.
This movie has been criticized as misrepresenting feminism (although I think it’s more a character study than a message movie anyway.) In the end, Alice is having a hard time on her own, and Kristofferson tells her “I don’t care about my ranch. I’ll take you to Monterey.” She needs help, and a man gives it to her. Some say this undercuts the feminist message of the movie. To me, this is a misunderstanding. We’ve seen how hard Alice is struggling, and how much she has been able to surprise herself and accomplish on her own. But it is difficult to make a life for yourself with nothing but a child who depends on your for everything no matter who you are. What’s important is, by the end Alice has decided that she wants to be a singer and nothing is more important than that, rather than hemming and hawing and worrying about not being good enough. She accepts a male partner’s help, but only does so because he’s offering to help her rather than ask her to help him. He’s willing to give up the ranch he’s worked six years to own in order to help her do what she wants to do, and it’s the first time in the movie, and probably Alice’s life, that anyone has ever given up anything for her sake rather than vice versa. It’s a reversal of the usual role, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with accepting a partner into one’s life, nor do I think there is anything unfeminist about the idea of a man giving up his own ambitions to help a woman pursue hers.
But frankly, all that is kind of secondary. The joy of this film are the simple moments that feel like you’re living them. Like when Alice tells Flo she worries she isn’t any good at singing anymore because she’s got a “wiggle in her voice” and Flo says “Well honey I aint gonna bullshit you. You better get that wiggle out or take up somethin’ else” and they both just laugh, partly because it’s a funny thing to say and partly because of the simple relief of being able to talk to someone who will really listen. Or the way the camera focuses so close on Kristofferson and Alice when she asks to touch his beard, and you can see every pore on their faces, every hair in the beard she’s running her fingers across, and you can hear the wind blowing like it’s blowing in your own ear. When they kiss, it feels almost as close and intimate and tactile as any first kiss I’ve ever had.
I forgot to mention Jodie Foster as Audrey, the androgynous young girl who takes a liking to Alice’s son. I believe this was one of her first film roles, and we’ll see her again in Taxi Driver next. Here she’s only in a handful of scenes, but she plays it with such charm and swagger that she steals even the smallest moment, a child pretending to know about things like drugs and sex and hard living, but you can tell she’s figuring it all out as much as anyone.
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore may be considered lesser Scorsese, perhaps only truly noteable for being one of the only films he made about a woman, but I think it deserves more than that. It’s a kind and compassionate movie, beautifully filmed, and doesn’t bullshit its audience about people or how they talk or how they live. There are no easy answers and no people who are easy to figure out, unless they decide to let you try. Although my own experiences are vastly different from Alice’s, the story feels so lived-in and real it’s like watching a movie about my own life.
Next: Taxi Driver
Previous: Mean Streets
