Movie: Alice's Restaurant (Arthur Penn, 1969)
I have a lot of love for the (American) counterculture movement, but its ideals tend to be better than its movies. Alice's Restaurant is an adaptation of Arlo Guthrie's 18-minute breakout song Alice's Restaurant Massacree, essentially a glorified podcast in which Guthrie rambles on about a rather insignificant incident, with a superficial anti-war message added to the back of it. The film has Pete Seeger cover Woody Guthrie's (Arlo's father) Pastures of Plenty and an unknown singer perform Joni Mitchell's Songs to Aging Children Come. Both songs barely last three minutes, but evoke much stronger images and feelings just through their lyrics and performances than anything the movie actually visualises. That's perhaps understandable; Alice's Restaurant Massacree is such a literal-minded song that the movie doesn't really have anywhere to go.
Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Joni Mitchell are probably three of the greatest American artists of the 20th century and it is not entirely fair to complain that Arlo Guthrie is not as poetic as them. Unfortunately, there are many other reasons why he is the main problem with the film. For one, he has barely any screen presence and can't act. In a previous post on Trading Places, I wrote how much I love Eddie Murphy for essentially always breaking the fourth wall between him and the audience. Well, Guthrie seems to be breaking the fourth wall between him and the director. You get the feeling that he is concentrating so much on making sure that Penn approves his line deliveries and expressions that he is barely able to convincingly interact with his fellow actors. The bigger issue is that this also seems to be his attitude towards the counterculture in general. Alice's Restaurant Massacree feels like the equivalent of an overexcited teenage boy telling his older friends about the first time he bought alcohol, without yet knowing how to drink it and experience its pleasures. To an extent, that's understandable as Guthrie was 20 when he wrote the song, but what makes the whole thing even more grating is that he combines his childish affect with ironic swerves that are meant to make him seem more knowing than he is.
Guthrie's strained presence permeats the whole film, There are too many stiff and stilted scenes that peter out indifferently and as a result there is so little connecting tissue between individual moments that everything feels even more inconsequential than it is on paper. Some dialogue scenes come off as so affected it almost feels as if the actors have been dubbed. Thankfully, in the second half, the focus moves away a bit from Arlo towards Alice (Patricia Quinn) and her boyfriend Ray (James Broderick). Aside from owning a restuarant in Stockbridge, Massachussets, they also own a deconsecrated church where they host (parties for) various fellow travelers in the counterculture movement. Alice sleeps with many of these visitors, but always returns to the much older (and seemingly monogamous) Ray, who is a bit of a mysterious figure. It is unclear whether he is a genuine believer in the ideals of his communitiy, or a con man who uses the movement to exert power and manipulate the people close to him. Alice and Ray's relationship is a fascinating one (they are not good for each other, but are ultimately all they got) and leads to broader questions about the counterculture movement as a whole. Whether it's secular or not, Alice's church sees much of the same rituals.
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