Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

The movie “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”is directed by Martin Scorsese. This movie is a sendup of the Hollywood dreamworld that little girls were supposed to lug around in their intellectual baggage a generation ago. It opens with a fake sunset spread across the screen, against which strolls a sweet little thing, past sets that seem to have been salvaged from “The Wizard of Oz.” But her dreams and her dialogue are not made of sugar-and-spice; this little girl’s going to do it her way.

At least, that was her defiant childhood notion. By thirty-five Alice Hyatt has more or less adapted herself to society’s groove. She’s married to an inarticulate truck driver, she has a twelve-year old son who knows all the angles, she kills time gossiping with the neighbors. Then her husband is killed in an auto accident, and she is left widowed and what may be even worse independent: Can she get along by herself after having somebody there all those years?

Yes, she can. She idolized Alice Faye when she was a little girl down South and swore up and down that someday she would become a singer like Alice Faye. Well, now she’s thirty-five years old if she is a day (and Ellen Burstyn plays thirty-five as well as ever I hope to be able to play it), and if this isn’t someday then what is?

So she sells the house at a garage sale, packs everything into storage except for one suitcase apiece for herself and Tommie (Alfred Lutter), kisses everybody good-bye on finally for good terms (except for Harvey Keitel), gets out “The Singer’s Complete Songbook,” and heads West in search of destiny.

What happens to her route provides one of the most accurate funny painful portraits of an American woman I’ve ever seen on film and I think this film is less about Alice than it is about the speculations and daydreams of a lot of women of her age, who have been identifying with other women’s liberations but are somewhat hazy on the subject of their own.

Along the way, for example, Alice falls in love with a divorced farmer who lives with his mother; he never makes any pretense of being able to offer her anything except occasional passionate sex and has no intention whatsoever of divorcing his wife.

He does suggest that she might get a job as a waitress in Tucson a suggestion that grabs hold of her imagination the way all her biggest mistakes usually do and once there she flukes into a waitresses’ job at the same restaurant where Flo (Diane Ladd) is employed as “the greasy spoon’s answer to Raquel Welch.”

This Arizona period when Alice waits on tables provides Scorsese’s most delicate and delightful comedy to date. The customers are variously pathetic, demanding, thoughtful or vulgar especially vulgar when Agnes (Jodie Foster) comes back from Albuquerque having learned how to say “cheeseburger” in Navajo and Flo bullies everybody including Scorsese himself.

Butterflies occur throughout: They decorate wallpaper patterns behind people talking seriously about their feelings, they flutter across lonesome highways beneath towering clouds in colors so vivid that it looks as if they must have been hand-painted by God Himself; they turn up tattooed on the biceps of gentle cowboys. And suddenly at one point near Tucson we see an actual butterfly caught inside another kind of butterfly caught inside an empty Coke bottle rolling along with scraps and papers down an empty highway and I almost don’t dare tell you whose face appears next.

The movie has been attacked from feminist quarters and defended from feminist quarters, but I think it deserves better than that. It seems to me more appropriate perhaps not to ideology but rather somewhere outside ideology, in the area of contemporary myth and romance: “They call me Alice,” says Burstyn, and sometime maybe I’ll tell you who said that.

Sometimes Scorsese takes Alice and her journey perfectly seriously; sometimes he lets things get harrowingly real (as when she starts crying in bed the morning after the divorced farmer’s mother locks him out of the house for not going to work); sometimes he edges into slight cheerful exaggeration (as with the thuggishness of Tommy Lee Jones as a fellow trucker who picks her up).

Sometimes it is not even clear whose movie this is; “Alice” might just be one of those titles like “Johnny Guitar” which refers at once to character and to performer and to a certain quality of projection in our own minds. The four central performances are by Ellen Burstyn, Alfred Lutter, Jodie Foster and Kris Kristofferson (who plays an old buddy of mine from North Dakota). It is also possible that Martin Scorsese himself has never made a perceptibly better directorial job than this, his most recent project.

They cautiously fall in love, and there’s an interesting relationship between Kristofferson and Alfred Lutter, who does a great job as a certain kind of twelve-year-old kid. Most women in Alice’s position probably wouldn’t come across a convenient, understanding farmer young enough to be eligible for marriage, but then much of the film doesn’t operate on pure logic. There’s a little myth to them, while Scorsese sneaks up on his main theme.

There are single scenes brilliantly achieved throughout the movie. For example, Alice has a confrontation with another waitress endowed with an inspired vocabulary (Diane Ladd was nominated for an Oscar for this role). They become friends and one day have a conversation that is frank and honest while they lie out sunbathing.

The scene works right. Or the specific way her first employer backs into offering her a singing job. Or the way Alice takes leave from her old neighbors. Or the way her son persists in explaining a joke that could only be understood by a twelve-year old boy. These are great moments in a film which gives us Alice Hyatt: female, thirty-five years old, undefeated.

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