A young mother struggles to find her place
in the world after her husband suddenly dies. DRAMA
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Alice Doesn't Live
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Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore seems, to me at least, like the natural progression of Scorsese's vision with Who's That Knocking at My Door. It's a solid drama with hints of comedy throughout and a brilliant performance from Ellen Burstyn that deservedly won her an Oscar. Weird that they would later turn this movie into a sitcom, but I digress. With this film, we get to see, early on in his career, a filmmaker with a lot to say. Scorsese showed that he wasn't going to be doing just gangster flicks and exploitation films. He was going to tell stories.
Alice (Burstyn) is a housewife with a bratty son (Lutter) who is left penniless when her abusive husband dies in an accident. She takes a road trip and tries to settle down as a singer, where she meets Ben (Keitel), who turns out to be married and a complete psychopath. She runs away from him and ends up in Tucson, where she becomes a waitress and falls in love with seemingly normal rancher David (Kristofferson). Things are going well until David smacks her kid, prompting Alice to break it off. Of course, later David says he still wants to see her, and Alice (who is incapable of not being in a relationship, regardless of the side effects to her and her son) leaps into his arms, giving us a happy ending. But is it? Is it a happy ending when you know that he's an old school disciplinarian who has no qualms about smacking another person's child? He'll probably kill them both before the year is out. This sappy ending nearly bankrupts the movie, but the performances are so good, particularly Diane Ladd. Alice is a woman who doesn't know how to be happy alone, so she leaps from toxic man to toxic man, and just absorbs the consequences when they inevitably happen. It was 1974, which I guess was too early to have the film end with Alice telling David to fuck off and be happy on her own. Still, it's a good movie. |