Fresh off the phenomenal success of The Exorcist in 1973, Ellen Burstyn was given carte blanche by Warner Bros. for a new project in which to showcase her range as a naturalistic actor. She chose a script by first-time screenwriter Robert Getchell, and then sought out an up-and-coming director to realize her vision. When Francis Ford Coppola suggested Martin Scorsese, Burstyn was skeptical. Mean Streets had just made a splash, putting the young director on the map, but it also felt like a movie made by, for and about men. What convinced Burstyn was Scorsese’s openness to the project, and his professed eagerness to learn more about what made women tick. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore couldn’t have been farther away in subject matter and tone from the gritty New York underworld that Scorsese seemed to feel so comfortable exploring, and this project marked an early turn towards the versatility that would punctuate the rest of his long career.
Alice is a put-upon housewife in Socorro, New Mexico, married to an abusive lout of a truck driver who gets himself killed in a highway accident, leaving her widowed along with their 12 year-old son, Tommy (Alfred Lutter III). In the title role, Burstyn exudes both grief and excitement in her newfound freedom. Without a job, her reflexive plan is to pack up and move back to her hometown of Monterey, California, where she remembers once being happy. The movie follows mother and son along that road trip, like a women’s-lib odyssey filled with terror and wonder along the way. Here there be monsters, but also moments of beauty and grace.
What most stands out in Scorsese’s direction is his affection for the characters, and his skill with the actors. The movement of the camera and the pacing of the editing seem to reflect this generosity of spirit for Alice and Tommy, but also for the rotating cast of side characters and extras who pop into frame for a shot or two and then are never seen again. Intent on finding work as a lounge singer, Alice explores the seamy world of highway roadhouses and smalltown taverns in her one good dress, talking her way into playing an audition for a regular gig. There’s a transporting scene in one of these lounges where she plays an electric piano set up among the buckets and sinks behind the bar, singing an old Rodgers and Hart tune for a handful of cowboys and day-drinkers. The camera circles like a besotted spectator watching Alice through the crowd as her dream begins falling into place. She’s not great, but she’s pretty good, and there’s a sense that she might have lucked out and found a soft landing for her little family before running into too much trouble. But then she meets Harvey Keitel.
Having already embodied sketchy masculine energy in two of Scorsese’s previous films, Keitel slides onto screen like a snake in the garden. While he’s only in a handful of scenes, his eventual blow-up is one of the most terrifying outbursts of violence Scorsese ever put to film. Alice and Tommy, shellshocked, hit the road again, in even more desperate straits than they were before. There’s something essentially American about the sight of a tattered family crossing the landscape in a station wagon, without a dollar to their name but hopeful of finding some way to earn a meal and a place to sleep in the next town down the line. In Alice’s dialogue, the talking points of early-’70s feminism come through, sounding charmingly dated, but there’s a deeper sense that her story is universal at a time when families were breaking up all over and capitalism was metastasizing across the land.
Asked about the film’s apparent message of women’s liberation, Scorsese asserted that, in fact, “it’s about human liberation.” When she lands a waitressing job in an Arizona town, Alice settles into a demoted view of herself, acclimating to the edgy wisecracks from fellow waitress Flo (Diane Ladd), and struggling to keep up with the seemingly unrelenting whirlwind of chatter and hungry folks at Mel’s Diner. (This whole milieu was spun off into a CBS sitcom, “Alice,” which ran for nearly a decade.) Here Scorsese finds another essential but often overlooked strand within his evolving style―humor. The hubbub at Mel’s teeters on the absurd, all of it working in counterpoint to Alice’s growing exasperation. When she hits a breaking point, she and Flo escape to the bathroom where the camera settles on the two of them perched together, commiserating about the shittiness of men while scenes of mounting chaos in the unstaffed diner are crosscut for comic effect. The bond between the two women forms in a moment of heartfelt sincerity even as an absolute circus swirls around them with Felliniesque glee.
Enter Kris Kristofferson. As a diner patron, he’s a local rancher who sweeps Alice off her feet, seemingly too good to be true, and she’s appropriately skeptical but ultimately helpless against his charm. His character, David, proves to be the weakest part of the story, seemingly concocted as Alice’s reward for going through hell for so long, and yet Scorsese’s deft touch finds a good dose of humanity and specificity in his role. Despite an episode of Keitel-adjacent menace that nearly blows up the relationship, there are some lovely moments of seemingly improvised flirtation between David and Alice that fully sell their chemistry. His interactions with Tommy feel similarly lived-in, especially an ongoing bit that revolves around the boy insisting on explaining the nonsensical punchline to a joke that only a 12-year-old could appreciate―a riff that apparently sprang from the young actor’s off-screen antics. Scorsese’s generosity with his actors found ways to put these moments on the screen, to great effect.
The story arc with David culminates in a dramatic confrontation in Mel’s Diner when Alice finds the guts to stand up for herself and her dream of reaching Monterey. It’s a heroic moment for her―Burstyn earned a Best Actress Oscar for this role―but it’s defused a bit by David’s quick capitulation, as if the script were trying to meet a countdown clock for a happy ending. Still, the film earns its final riding-into-the-sunset moment as Alice and Tommy stroll into an urban landscape where a neon sign reading “Monterey” stands in the distance. The only glimpse we ever see of that promised destination is in the film’s opening scene, presented in a strangely anachronistic set piece of a farmhouse on a soundstage like a lost clip from The Wizard of Oz. Alice is seen as a young girl, strolling along a country lane and singing an old Alice Faye tune. It’s a dream vision of a time and place that never really existed and will surely never return, because she doesn’t live there anymore.
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