Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE   ***1/2

Martin Scorsese

1974

IDEA:  Following the sudden death of her husband, a woman sets off with her 11-year-old son through the American Southwest to start a new life.

BLURB:  In the context of Scorsese’s recent output of stately three-hour-plus historical epics, it is truly jolting to revisit an early work such as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which thrums with a vibrantly offbeat and freewheeling energy that feels mostly foreign to the director’s work in the 21st century. One laments the film’s widespread dismissal as merely his anomalous “women’s picture.” Of course, the film is Scorsese’s version of a women’s picture, and brilliantly so, taking the tropes of a classical Hollywood melodrama and spiking them with a bracingly New Hollywood audiovisual language. Through writing, acting, cinematography, editing, and sound, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is constantly defying expectations of what kind of shape and tone this story should have. This playfully protean approach results in some of Scorsese’s brightest and most inventively rangy filmmaking, from the teasing Technicolor artifice of the prologue to the tiny comedic masterpieces of the road trip scenes, which use sonic repetition and smash cuts to convey Alice’s growing irritation with her antsy passenger. Sometimes within the same scene, Scorsese toggles between registers of madcap farce and documentary verisimilitude, a combination that, if not always seamless, is never less than invigorating in the affects it generates. It’s all anchored by the nonpareil chemistry between Ellen Burstyn’s Alice and Alfred Lutter’s Tommy, one of cinema’s most winsomely unconventional mother-son duos. By turns antagonistic, chummy, and Oedipal, it’s a mercurial relationship that emblematizes the film’s dynamic, slippery portrait of a woman who exists beyond archetype.