Alice's Restaurant

The best films about late 1960s counterculture are ones that see right through it, or maybe lament that everything wasn't as pure as intended.  You can try to create some sort of utopia, a place off the grid where folks live together in harmony and all, but as humans are humans the cracks in the dome will soon manifest and your little group of brothers and sisters will fall prey to the same faults and sins of their showered 9-5 brethren.  In 1969's ALICE'S RESTAURANT, such a band will form in a building that used to be a house of worship, perhaps a symbol of intolerance and repression to many hippies and troubadours.

One such wanderer is Arlo, played by folk singer Arlo Guthrie.  He's more or less playing himself in a film based on his 1967 song of the same name, one that has been a Thanksgiving Day tradition on FM rock stations for years.  How successful can director Arthur Penn's film, based on an eighteen minute song, be?  Does Penn and Venable Herndon's script, based on real events but with considerable liberties, justify a nearly two hour picture?

Yeah....maybe....It certainly could've been shorter.  And tighter.  It meanders, just like Arlo in his bitchin' red VW microbus.  The movie spends too much time on certain plotlines, such as the brouhaha surrounding his incarceration for littering and the subsequent trial.  It does allow Penn and editor Dede Allen to show off a bit with an impressive and complex rapid fire montage.  This incident apparently really happened, and I was surprised that a free spirit would so recklessly trash Mother Earth.  To boot...a more serious misdemeanor would've rendered Guthrie's efforts to duck the draft more effective.

And those scenes are the most entertaining in the movie.  The wonderful character actor M. Emmett Walsh shows up as a rather animated and incoherent sergeant.  Viewers old enough to remember the anxiety surrounding the lottery that could lead to your ticket to Vietnam may watch with amusement and nausea.  Later generations with a sigh of relief.

Said utopia is lead by Ray (James Broderick) and Alice (Pat Quinn), who invite the unwashed to crash in their secularized, deconsecrated church.  They're a happy couple at first, but Ray doesn't help out in the titular restaurant (run offsite) much.  His what the hell attitude may also be the catalyst to lead Alice into an affair with one of the bohemians, Shelly (Michael McClanathan), who is eventually revealed to be a heroin addict.  ALICE'S RESTAURANT in fact portrays Alice as a bit of a sleep around, perhaps a commentary on "free love".   I couldn't discern if the movie approved or otherwise of her casualness toward marital fidelity.  The real Alice spoke out against what she called an inaccurate portrayal. 

Several of my favorite films consider the transitory natures of the zeitgeist.  The very passage of time. Films like DAZED AND CONFUSED and THE LAST PICTURE SHOW.   The finale of Penn's film effectively suggests that the peace and love planned utopia was not to endure.  A long shot that lingers on one of the characters says it all. 

I liked ALICE'S RESTAURANT, though Arlo is no actor, even if he was just being Arlo.  He does not have a lot of charisma, and the subplot involving his dying father (Woody, of course) was underdeveloped.   There's a moment when Arlo happens by a tent revival, his narration inquiring of his dad's travels past the same point years before.  Had there been more of this, ALICE'S RESTAURANT could've been a classic, rather than merely a time capsule curiosity.