Alice<\/em> might seem like an atypical Scorsese picture, but its opening moments illustrate a fundamental conflict that would come to define his career. We begin on a gorgeously artificial soundstage farm, complete with a painted sunset and pillowy, Valentine red credits introducing our protagonist at the age of eight. She\u2019s shot like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz<\/em>, singing an old standard when Alice\u2019s mother calls her in for dinner and threatens to \u201cbeat the daylights out of her\u201d if she doesn\u2019t hurry up. The kid complies, muttering obscenities under her breath as the soundtrack is jarringly overwhelmed by a rockin\u2019 Mott The Hoople song. Here\u2019s the 32-year-old filmmaker helming his first studio picture with all the tools and traditions of a Golden Age system he reveres, yet he cannot help being Martin Scorsese.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That kind of tension animates the entire movie, which follows Burstyn\u2019s 35-year-old Alice from New Mexico to Phoenix to Tucson with her 12-year-old son Tommy (Alfred Lutter) in tow. It\u2019s an episodic story about muddling through and making the same mistakes more than once, the kind of real-life behavior patterns that don\u2019t always lend themselves to cinema. Alice\u2019s husband was an abusive trucker who was horrible to their son. (He\u2019s so hateful to the kid that I always find myself mis-remembering Tommy as her son from a previous marriage. It\u2019s odd that the movie never allows the boy to register any feelings about losing his father, even if the guy was an unbelievable asshole.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the help of Mean Streets<\/em> cinematographer Kent L. Wakeford and editor Marcia Lucas (who would go on to cut Taxi Driver<\/em> and New York, New York<\/em> for Scorsese before his history-making collaboration with Thelma Schoonmaker began in earnest), Alice<\/em> has a roving, wobbly visual technique, the unsettled camera and abrupt cuts evoking the characters\u2019 transience and uncertain living situations. It\u2019s more volatile than you\u2019d expect from a story like this, scenes suddenly exploding into laughter or tears as befitting an exhausted mom\u2019s mood swings. The thing about Tommy is he isn\u2019t a cute, precocious movie kid. He\u2019s annoying in the way children that age are experts at needling you when you\u2019ve had a long day at work and just need a goddamn minute to yourself, for Chrissakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Burstyn\u2019s interactions with child actor Lutter are expert improvisations. The two seem to share a secret language the way mothers and little boys often do when they\u2019ve been on their own together. Driven out of Phoenix after a dalliance with a psycho redneck boyfriend \u2014 played by Harvey Keitel with a Stetson, a switchblade and a scorpion necklace \u2014 Alice and Tommy find themselves stranded in Tucson, where she temporarily puts her dreams of a music career on hold and winds up working at a diner that may look familiar to fans of sitcom reruns. Alice immediately butts heads with Flo, a potty-mouthed waitress with a beehive hairdo played by Diane Ladd, who very nearly steals the entire movie. (You can see a lot of Ladd\u2019s daughter Laura Dern\u2019s Emmy-winning Big Little Lies<\/em> performance in Flo\u2019s profane eruptions. You can also see a 7-year-old Laura Dern herself eating an ice cream cone in the background of a scene.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is not commented upon enough that a sitcom spinoff of a film by Martin Scorsese ran for nine seasons on CBS. (Only two years fewer than the same network\u2019s sitcom based on a Robert Altman movie.) Vic Tayback\u2019s Mel was the only actor from Alice Doesn\u2019t Live Here Anymore<\/em> who reprised his role on Alice<\/em> \u2013 young Lutter was replaced after the pilot \u2013 though curiously enough, Ladd did wind up joining the cast as an old flame of Mel\u2019s in a later season. (Flo was played by Polly Holliday in the show, memorably turning Ladd\u2019s exhortation to \u201ckiss me where the sun don\u2019t shine\u201d to the more TV-friendly catch-phrase \u201ckiss my grits.\u201d She got a short-lived spinoff of her own, creatively titled Flo<\/em>.) Even more curiously, a character on the program played by Celia Weston was revealed to be a relative of The Dukes of Hazzard<\/em> villain Boss Hogg, who dropped by the diner one episode for a guest shot, accompanied by his sidekick, Enos. Does this mean them Duke boys are part of the Extended Scorsese Universe?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alice and Flo\u2019s slow-building camaraderie is the film\u2019s most satisfying subplot, a good deal livelier than Burstyn\u2019s hesitant romance with a rancher played by Kris Kristofferson. As always, enviably at ease in his own skin and constitutionally incapable of buttoning his shirt, Kristofferson\u2019s character is the perfect man for Alice until he isn\u2019t. Then he is again. The movie feels like it\u2019s missing a few scenes in the final stretches, and Scorsese has admitted he\u2019s only partially happy with the final edit. (\u201cWe shot a three-and-a-half hour picture and had to cut it down to two hours,\u201d the director said in 1989\u2019s Scorsese on Scorsese<\/em>, back in the days before he was allowed to release three-and-a-half hour movies.) Burstyn won the Oscar for Best Actress, but didn\u2019t attend the ceremony because she was performing on Broadway, leaving her director to accept the award on her behalf. He wouldn\u2019t take home one of his own for another 32 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some feminist critics found fault with the film\u2019s Hollywood ending, which is a little more ambiguous than I think it gets credit for. Anyway, by that point we\u2019ve seen Alice suffer enough. Who\u2019s gonna begrudge the lady a few more rolls in the hay with Kris Kristofferson?<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” is streaming on Netflix<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/alice2-1024x577.jpg\")
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