Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore begins with a musical number – an homage to The Wizard of Oz, drenched in Technicolor red and filmed on a set that could only have been built in Hollywoodland. A young Alice belts out a showtune on a ranch somewhere in proverbial Kansas; she declares she can outperform Alice Faye, thus expositing her dream of becoming an elegant singer. Then a sudden smash cut thrusts us into the opening credits, and also into Scorsese territory, as the titles (written in semi-ironic, Blue Velvet-style cursive script) appear over a speeding tracking shot that races over the rooftops of Socorro, New Mexico, 27 years later. The sleek fantasia of classic Hollywood musicals is violently jarred with the fast-paced, no-frills, rough-edged, happy-sad milieu of 1970s New American cinema, a movement of which Scorsese was one of the foremost progenitors. The rapid-fire, profanity-laced dialogue enlivens what could have been a syrupy soap opera, ultimately creating what might be best described as hyper-naturalism.
Still halfway through shooting The Exorcist, Ellen Burstyn was offered the tantalizing opportunity to put another project into production at Warner Bros., with relatively unfettered creative control. As the actress is quoted in Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Robert Getchell's script for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore found its way to Burstyn, albeit in slightly rosier, sleeker tones ("in a kind of Doris Day-Rock Hudson kind of way," she explained). She immediately began searching for a rougher-edged director who might inject some much-needed grit and despair into the proceedings; a viewing of Mean Streets convinced her that Scorsese was the right man for the job, though (by his own admission) he knew nothing about women.
Emerging in the middle years of American second-wave feminism, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore was both celebrated and decried upon its release for endorsing (or failing to) women's agency in modern American life. Burstyn and Scorsese agreed that they wanted to portray a newly strong and independent woman who came to the realization that she doesn't need the companionship of a man for security and happiness. A powerful indictment of the entitlement and domestic violence perpetrated by men (an indictment all the more sobering because it shares screen time with poignant humanism and breakneck comedy), Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore follows its titular character after she and her son Tommy abandon their hometown, following the accidental death of her husband – a gruff, emotionally pent-up man who provides money and little else for the family (though it's a sign of the movie's compassion that even he, while unlikeably morose and distant, is hardly the violent monster that a more simplistic movie would have presented him as). Hoping to achieve her dreams of becoming a singer in Monterey, California (a dream she abandoned upon getting pregnant and marrying), the duo's limited funds only get them as far as Phoenix, where Alice stumbles into an affair with the movie's only truly horrible character: Harvey Keitel's Ben, who mercilessly beats his wife in front of Alice when she finds out he's having an affair. Fearfully protecting Tommy from Ben's violence, Alice and her son move on to Tucson, where she lands a job as a diner waitress and reluctantly falls in love with David, the strong-silent type who's given considerable depth and sensitivity by Kris Kristofferson's performance. Having experienced only violence and alienation from the men in her life (aside from Tommy, with whom she has a jokey, intimate, completely naturalistic relationship), Alice holds any kind of relationship with David at arm's length – but, as often happens, their mutual attraction defuses any kind of self-professed insularity.
Certainly Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is no Jeanne Dielman or Riddles of the Sphinx, and its allegiance to feminism is shaky in some ways: it was, of course, directed by a man (although apparently the right man for the job, and the director whom Burstyn enlisted), but more debatable is the movie's happy ending. Rather than eschewing any kind of romantic relationship, David decides to follow Alice and Tommy to Monterey, where she can embark on her singing career. (A gorgeous performance she offers at a tiny nightclub in Phoenix reveals how promising her ambition actually is.) In fact, the original ending had Alice abandoning David, embracing her individuality and self-reliance; but Warner Bros., seeking a more satisfying resolution, pleaded for a happy-ending compromise. Though Alice and Tommy's trek to Monterey in some kind of stoic solidarity would have proclaimed a stronger endorsement of feminism, the ending as it currently stands is more humanistic than ideological, asking the equally difficult question of whether those victimized in relationships can or should still find love in the world. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore does provide a romantic union between man and woman, but this seems more because Scorsese and his cast care so deeply for these characters, not out of any kind of capitulation to a patriarchal insistence on heteronormative relationships.
Scorsese is typically known for his immersive portrayals of criminal communities and his deconstruction of violent masculinity, yet I've always felt that his non-crime pictures – particularly After Hours, The King of Comedy, The Age of Innocence, Hugo, and of course Alice – are his most interesting. While Scorsese's aesthetic prowess is always on display in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (the mobility of the camera in both the frenetic restaurant scenes and during Alice's nightclub performances are astonishing), even more impressive is his work with this incredible ensemble cast (which also features Diane Ladd as Alice's outspoken coworker and Jodie Foster, in one of her first film roles, as Tommy's cynical, wine-guzzling young companion). Ellen Burstyn achieves a deft balancing act between wisecracking resilience and veiled vulnerability, and her seemingly effortless believability in both this and The Exorcist (which are, of course, completely disparate roles), and her rapport with Alfred Lutter as Tommy (who was cast after auditioning 300-some young actors) has an acrobatic intensity.
If the movie had decided to devote its energies to either bleak working-class suffocation or zippy familial sitcom, it may have been an interesting time-capsule document (the movie's portrayal of southwest America in the mid-1970s is always a wonder to behold); but by deftly infusing its energetic comedy with unflinching portrayals of gender politics and domestic violence, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore becomes an overwhelming happy-sad combustion, in the manner of the best Billy Wilder or Ernst Lubitsch. Its methodology is vaguely postmodern: the stylized opening, an homage to classic musicals, reminds us that relationships in real life do not operate according to cinematic fairy-tale splendor. But the movie is too sincere, too compassionate, too in love with the unexpected turns that life takes, to completely deprive its characters of the happiness they so clearly deserve. An unheralded masterpiece in both Scorsese's and Burstyn's filmographies, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is one of the most dazzling and humanistic treasures of 1970s American cinema.
"My Canon" is a series in which I analyze my 100 favorite films in detail, in alphabetical order. Here is my introduction.
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