Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974, Martin Scorsese) (Patreon)

66/100

Second viewing, last seen 1996. Very early on, Scorsese employs a camera move that I associate almost exclusively with After Hours, rapidly pushing across the room and then just as rapidly pulling back in conjunction with an actor's horizontal movement through the frame. Between that and the old-Hollywood title sequence/prologue, which had escaped my memory, I began anticipating a re-evaluation along the lines of "way more Scorsese-esque than it superficially appears." But Alice genuinely is an anomaly, not just in terms of subject matter but in its fundamental approach to narrative. Take Alice's husband (please): The movie spends a lot of time establishing the guy as a lout, seemingly preparing to reveal that Alice doesn't live there anymore because she finally got fed up and left him. Instead, he's killed in an auto accident that makes all of his character flaws utterly irrelevant. This threw me for a bit, but as the film went on, a strange quality—strange for a Scorsese picture, anyway—took hold. Robert Getchell's screenplay seems wholly interested in each scene for its own sake, as if it were a stand-alone short rather than a stepping stone; the film becomes deeply invested in very minor characters during their brief screen time, and in general just never seems in any hurry whatsoever to get to the next "beat." It takes Alice half the movie to arrive at Mel and Ruby's Cafe, because—to cite just one example of many—we spend a full minute watching the random bar owner for whom she auditions in Phoenix struggling to react to her crying jag, able only to repeat "I don't even have a piano in here" over and over again. (Later, when she asks if there's any particular song he'd like to hear her sing, he recites what sounds like the entire chorus to a tune she's unfamiliar with, continuing to spew lyrics even as she shakes her head and says "No" aloud, as if his personal connection to that song were the film's secret subject. Again, this dude is of no importance whatsoever.) At times, Alice feels more like Demme than like Scorsese, though the latter's abiding interest in men behaving badly repeatedly surfaces.

A potential drawback of this heavily detailed, all-inclusive approach, of course, is that it risks apparent shapelessness. That in turn can produce late-breaking manufactured conflict, e.g. Kristofferson decking the kid in frustration and precipitating a breakup, just so that the movie has somewhere that it can go for an ending. Even were I not distracted by pre-adolescent Laura Dern* enjoying an ice cream cone as an extra on Mom's set, I'd dislike the final restaurant scene, with its Big Showy Public Speech and strangers applauding the couple's kiss. That's really the only significant complaint that I have, though—mostly, the film just remains on the same low-key, thoroughly engrossing level throughout, reveling in its unusually combative mother-son dynamic and allowing Burstyn to roam across the full emotional spectrum, from sublimely goofy to heartbreakingly defeated. While I wouldn't say that Alice feels devoid of Scorsese's personality, by any means—that prologue absolutely plants a flag, even if what follows rarely salutes it—this is perhaps as deferential to a script as he's ever been, for better and worse. Better in the sense that his instinct to stay out of the way was probably correct, in this instance; worse only in the sense that the result lacks the jolting highs of his masterpieces. Among other things, I'm not sure that any other Scorsese film concludes on such an oddly ambivalent note, with Alice stating her decision to remain in Tucson and then walking toward a huge restaurant (?) sign that reads "Monterey," carefully framed so that a pole splits the sign straight up the middle, lining up exactly with the lowercase "t." Taxi Driver's the greater film by far, but I'm more productively confounded by this final shot than by Travis' glance into his rear-view mirror, to be honest.

* For someone my age, who grew up watching Alice (the sitcom), Vic Tayback's presence as Mel in this film, opposite a completely different Alice, Flo, and Vera, remains downright surreal. See also Gary Burghoff in Altman's MASH. On top of which I happened to revisit Panic Room not long ago and it's freaky how much Kristen Stewart in that film resembles Jodie Foster here. Oh, and there's a line of dialogue that I knew I'd heard a zillion times, but couldn't for the life of me remember in what context; it turned out to have been sampled at the beginning of an especially shitty Howard Jones song, which until now I hadn't heard since like 1988.