Mark Turner
Twilight Time offers another Woody Allen film for fans to enjoy or non-fans to disregard. Once more he teams of with life partner (at the time) Mia Farrow to present a tale that takes place in his familiar New York City. This time he takes the neurosis found in most of his films and gives them nods to both the Lewis Carroll classic ALICE IN WONDERLAND and Federico Fellini's JULIET OF THE SPIRITS.Alice (Farrow) is a well to do married woman who still feel empty inside. Her days are spent with the children being looked over by their nanny, shopping at the most expensive stores and with nothing more than small talk with her wealthy husband Doug (William Hurt). Picking up the kids one day she sees another parent there named Joe (Joe Mantegna) that she's attracted to.Her guilt over this attraction causes her to have back pains. Complaining of the backache to her friends while shopping one suggest that she try an acupuncturist and herbalist she know called Dr. Yang (Keye Luke in his final film performance). With nothing to lose Alice visits Yang who tells her the problem is not in her back but in her head and her heart. He provides her with some herbs to take at a precise time.The next day she picks up the kids after taking the herbs and meets Joe again while waiting. The herbs have left her uninhibited and she flirts mercilessly with Joe, making a date to meet the following day. She doesn't follow through with the date but returns to Dr. Yang who gives her new herbs to use, this time making her invisible.While invisible she watches Joe as he meets up with his ex-wife (Judy Davis) in her office and the two have a quickie there for old time's sake. This makes her glad she didn't go through with her meeting. It also sends her back to Dr. Yang who gives her different herbs, this time giving her the ability to see her old beau, Ed (Alec Baldwin), who died before they could marry. Ed suggest that she give Joe a chance and learn more about him.Each suggestion that Alice follows opens up new doors to what's really going on inside of her, her true emotions and feelings, rather than the superficial life she's been leaving. And each time she learns something new she returns to Dr. Yang who gives her more herbs that lead her in more directions with more people. Whether or not she will learn from her experiences and find happiness is what rounds out the film by the end credits.The story is interesting and inventive in its mix of mysticism, romance and light comedy. Each new herb yields yet another small story within the context of the larger whole, revealing as much about Alice to us as she learns about herself. The writing is some of the better that Allen has done from the films of his I've seen and it works well within the confines of the NYC world of the elite.The cinematography here is amazing. Where some movies do well either with interiors or exteriors but not always both, cinematographer Carlo di Palma (famous for shooting BLOW UP as well as many of Allen's later films) shows an expertise to be envied. His use of lighting and camera angles works in every shot.Perhaps the weakest element the film has is its lead actress, Farrow. I'll admit that my exposure to her performances is pretty limited to her appearances in other Allen films and ROSEMARY'S BABY. I've never found her to be a dynamic actress whose work I would want to seek out. But her performances in the films shot in NYC for Allen always feel the same to me. She always seems as if she's a weak willed woman with a constantly whining voice, always unsure of herself and more inclined to wallow in self-pity than anything else. Having recently watch Allen's MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY and learning that she had been intended to play the role Diane Keaton did I kept thinking that that movie would have felt completely different if that had happened. And not for the better. It doesn't matter if Alice finds herself here or not, the majority of the film has her so self-deprecating that it made it hard for me to feel for her.While critically acclaimed and nominated for various screenplay awards the movie was a box office flop. It should have done better because for the minor flaws in the film it was entertaining and a good representation of Allen's films. Perhaps it will find an audience on discs that will make up for that box office loss.Twilight Time is offering the film in a beautiful blu-ray presentation here in 1080p. Extras are slim to non-existent with just an isolated music & effects track and the original theatrical trailer. But fans of Allen will want to grab this up since like other Twilight Time releases it is limited to just 3,000 copies.
TheLittleSongbird
Alice is not Woody Allen at his best and admittedly I was expecting a little more from it after the brilliant Crimes and Misdemeanors(which is top 5 Allen) from the previous year. There are far better developed, more interesting and more identifiable characters in other Allen films, here some were underwritten and a couple like William Hurt's a touch irritating, the titular character was relatively well-developed though. Some of the actors are underused, like Hurt and Judy Davis and Mia Farrow does start off a little too stylised and soft which doesn't make her transformation quite as believable as it could have been. However, quite quickly she becomes very touching and her deadpan comic delivery really shines through, so while with not as strong a start it's actually a good performance. Joe Mantegna turns out good work too, although to a lesser extent he could have been better used, while Keye Luke, Cybill Shepherd and particularly Bernadette Peters and Alec Baldwin(in the most colourful supporting roles) make up an excellent supporting cast. Allen's direction is just right, the film looks beautiful with a dream-like quality at times and the soundtrack is hypnotic. The script and story are a mix of comedy, drama and fantasy, all three balanced well and all three work, with the comedy light-hearted and subtly witty, the drama affecting and not overwrought and the fantasy whimsical and nostalgic-feeling. Working out what was going on and what the film was trying to do and be wasn't a problem for me, and Alice ends cleverly and poignantly. All in all, a lovely film- if not as good as his late 70s-80s films- and a good start to Allen's 90s output though better was to come from that decade(Husbands and Wives, Manhattan Murder Mystery and Bullets Over Broadway). 8/10 Bethany Cox
Gavin567
ALICE is a mediocre film that could have been a good film. This is because Woody Allen likes to dabble in themes such as self-discovery and the angst of relationships with others and with the self, but he frames everything in schtick, so that everything that happens is basically the setup for jokes. This works well when he sticks to comedy and satirizes wealthy Upper West Side New Yorkers, but you can't have a film about self-discovery when everything that is about to become serious deteriorates into schtick. Male directors have a long history of fetishizing actresses and trying to squeeze their female secrets out of them, and Allen is no exception. But Allen goes one further, and makes his actresses like ventriloquist dummies who adopt his own neurotic self-deprecating style. So rather than trying to get into an actress's soul, as Rosselini or Bergman did, he inserts his own soul into them and has them be him. It's a sort of vampirism. Psychologists have noted that compassion lies in the ability not to understand how YOU would feel in another person's situation, but to understand how THEY feel, as THEMSLVES, as a person who is NOT you. Allen lacks compassion in that sense, and that is a strange handicap for a writer who is attempting scripts that deal with issues of identity. His vampirism causes him to create a world where his own values predominate: that is, where everyone has the hots for everyone else, and where the activity du jour is for people to jump in bed with one another. Mia Farrow's character Alice is originally drawn into this world, but in the end rejects it for higher spiritual needs (going to Calcutta, working with Mother Theresa, giving up her wealth and selfish lifestyle and servants, and doing her own cooking and cleaning). Female socialites gossip at the end of the film about her remarkable transformation, and include in the same breath the transformation of another friend who has had plastic surgery. While Allen seems to be making fun of these gossipy women, he is also shares their view of Alice: that her transformation is as shallow as having a facelift. He always takes a tone of petulant jealousy in his films when women reject him in favor of something else. He seems to feel most abandoned not when they are leaving him not another man, but when they are leaving him for a place where they can hide away from him in their own soul - to "find themselves." His most famous films - Annie Hall, Manhattan, and others - all deal with this theme of being rejected by a woman when she goes into herself. He makes fun of women when they do this. They are seen as flaky, self-involved, being attracted to new-agey forms of self-discovery that are beneath him. For me what is really deflating about his movies is his jealousy of the spiritual center of women, and his attempt to trivialize and belittle them for having deeper souls than him. It's as if he doesn't want anyone to feel anything beautiful if he can't. For Allen, women are disappointing because they have to go on these spiritual journeys and won't just go with romance (which for him means that everyone gets to bed everyone all the time). Even where there are opportunities for something really interesting to happen - such as when characters are given a magic potion that allows them to be invisible for a time - the only way they take advantage of this is to watch other people having sex, voyeuristically gaze at models undressing, or listen to people engaging in gossip about love affairs. So nothing ever rises above the level of a sex comedy.Most viewers will miss the references in the mostly 1930s soundtrack. Over the opening credits "Limehouse Blues" plays, a song from the '20s about the ghetto in Chinatown: "In Limehouse, where Orientals love to play, In Limehouse, where you can hear those blues all day…" This song is the setup for Alice's visit to the weird Chinese herbalist/ hypnotist doctor, and plays whenever Alice visits his exotic den in Chinatown. It's a type of racist humor that may have played well in the '50s, but not so well today. "I Remember You" plays when her dead husband pays her a visit, another gag. And "Alice Blue Gown" plays during Alice's moments of self-discovery and over the ending credits, and may even be the inspiration for the title and character name. This song is from around 1919, and is about a girl singing wistfully about a "beautiful Alice blue gown" that she used to have. Here are some of the lyrics: "In my sweet little Alice blue gown, When I first wandered down into town, I was so proud inside, As I felt every eye, And in every shop window I primped, passing by." This indeed is the way Allen looks at his Alice character: as a sweet girl proud to wear a lovely gown, primping and trying to catch men's eyes. He plays this song when Alice is going on her spiritual journey, which would seem inappropriate. It's as if he is saying that she is not a grown woman with children and her own inner life, but only a lovely young girl in a gown, a girl who exists only to be loved and admired but who is stupid enough to reject love for her own silly pursuits.In the end Allen makes fun of Alice's purity and refusal to wallow in bereft values like the others with the song, and by framing her selfless actions as a form of fanaticism. This is actually how sociopaths feel: jealous of people with real feelings and real love. Allen appears to have a voracious appetite for youth and innocence, which he merely tries to corrupt.
