Alice’s Restaurant (1969, Dir. Arthur Penn)
Synopsis:
America mid-1960’s: Folk musician, Arlo struggles to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam war. In between visiting his dying father in hospital and playing gigs, he decides to stay with old friends Alice and Ray Brock, in their new home of a deconsecrated church, in the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
The Brock’s new home is soon the gathering place for a large number of other young people, notably Shelly, a reformed drug addict who used to race with Ray and who is attracted to Alice.
Trying to be helpful, Arlo and his friend Roger decide to get rid of all the garbage that has accumulated over the Thanksgiving holiday. Finding the town dump closed, the two decide to dump the garbage with some other rubbish at the bottom of a nearby ravine. They are subsequently arrested by local Police Chief Obie and the arrest ultimately exempts Arlo from the draft. Meanwhile, tensions between Ray, Alice and Shelly come to a head with tragic consequences.
I’m breaking the the “no cult movies” rule once again here with this film. I mean, what could be more “cult” than a movie based on the lyrics of a song! However, this is really part of this movie’s charm — the fact that it’s whole concept is so bizarre that it truly is nothing like any other movie you’ve ever heard of.
One of the first problems is how to classify it. “Re-enacted documentary” is the closest I can think of. It’s story is based on a song which, up to a point, is based on real events. Several of the film’s participants (Guthrie, Officer Obie, Pete Seeger in a brief cameo) play themselves or perhaps a very thinly fictionalized version of themselves, whilst other characters are real-life participants played by actors (Alice and Ray Brock, the father of the Arlo character, who’s clearly modeled on His late father, protest singer Woody Guthrie ( the character is even referred to as “Woody” — although the film never explicitly states the character is meant to be him) and then there’s a further collection of characters who are (at best) amalgamations of, or characatures of, people Arlo knew at the time. Much of the film takes place in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; where the event that inspired the song took place, and clearly, at times, the actual locations are used. This often leads to the bizarre feeling of the viewer having to remind themselves that what they’re watching isn’t reality or even documented reality but instead a rather stylized version of it.
For me, who has (no doubt) a highly romanticized vision of what it must have been like to have “young and alive” during the heady days of of the early to mid-sixties folk explosion, this film is the closest I’ll ever come to experiencing what things were like back then. Sure, there are plenty of documentaries from or about that period, “Don’t Look Back”, “No Direction Home” etc — yet, either because they view the events of the time from a rarefied bubble of superstardom or look back at the time through the prism of now, they don’t impart the feeling of the times as closely as this does.
It’s quite clear that the film’s sympathies are with the likes of Arlo and his friends, rather than the establishment of unsympathetic cops, truckers, locals and the ridiculous American military machine (best embodied by an almost incomprehensible performance by a then fairly young-looking M.Emmet Walsh). However, perhaps because of director Arthur Penn’s (Bonnie & Clyde) older eye and experience — it also doesn’t shy away from showing the darker side to the “Free love generation”’s dream embodied here by the hypocrisy apparent in Alice and Ray’s “open marriage”, the tragic and clearly doomed character of Shelly and the parasitical “hangers on” that surround Arlo and his scene. Perhaps because he’s there portraying himself, Arlo’s nemesis, Officer Obie is not presented as the stereotypical hippie-hating policeman the song paints him as. In fact, re-watching the film for this article, I was struck by how reasonable he seemed — a harassed and rather pathetic figure, trying to maintain a semblance of law and order, as his small town community seems increasingly overrun by Arlo and his friends.
Despite the naturalistic performances of those portraying themselves however — the film’s true emotional heart and soul is held almost totally by James Broderick (father of Matthew) and Pat Quinn’s performances as Ray and Alice Brook, The older couple who provide support and place to stay for Arlo and many of his friends, at their home — a deconsecrated church. Both actors are exceptional — Broderick’s Ray is a mass of contradictions swinging wildly from exuberant bonhomie to irrational jealously and back. He’s a father figure to many of the youngsters who stay with them and yet it’s quite clear he’s not always the type of father figure they need — particularly in his confrontations with Alice and Shelly. By the end of the film, it’s clear he needs them far more than they really need or want to be around him. Quinn’s performance is even more remarkable. Few actresses, even today, would be comfortable playing a female character so schizophrenic in her desires: that she’s happy to play her “den mother” role to it’s logical extreme and have affairs with some of the youngsters who look to her for support, whilst still genuinely loving her caring, but often quite childish, husband. Fewer still could manage to make you feel sympathy for this person, but Quinn handles the transitions between the different facets of Alice’s character with ease and grace. It’s quite fitting then that the film should end with an extended shot of her staring out towards the camera and where Arlo has driven off.
As with a documentary, you have no feeling of “closure” with this film’s ending; just a sense (possibly the same feeling of that of Alice herself) of “where do we go from here?”. Perhaps its ending is a nod to another truth about the sixties generation — that, like Ray here, many refused to realize the point at which “the party was over”. Ultimately, for me, the film walks the tightrope of the two decades — the promise of the Sixties and the disillusionment of the Seventies — with finesse and that’s what saves it from being yet another time-capsule period piece.
