Word: penns
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Arthur Penn's new film, Alice's Restaurant, is an attempt to construct, of all things, a comedy around this sadness. It works. It works so well that I started crying about halfway through the movie and didn't really recover until the next morning. I don't even remember the last time I cried for a second in a theatre, but I had to cry during Alice's Restaurant. I had to cry to keep from going insane...
...from the word go, Alice's Restaurant is Arthur Penn's movie, not Arlo's. (In addition to directing, Penn co-wrote the screenplay with Venable Herndon.) The director's control becomes clear very early in the picture, where he gives us the first of several scenes set in Arlo's father's hospital room...
Like his last film, Bonnie and Clyde, Penn's latest is the story of a group of people who are out of sync with their society. Bonnie, Clyde, C. W. Moss, Blanche and Buck were misfits in a depression crazy America. They turned to violence as a means of etching out an existence against the fabric of a forlorn dust-bowl...
LIKE Easy Rider, then, Penn's film is full of the spirit of an America lost. But the films couldn't be more different. Rider gives us a hero and hope (Captain America) and a gun-wielding villain (middle America). Alice's Restaurant gives us no hero, no villain and precious little hope...
Also unlike Rider, Restaurant is incredibly close to earth. Grass is smoked, girls are screwed, and motorcycles are raced, but Penn and his wonderful film editor. Dede Allen, do not point at these things as Dennis Hopper does in the Peter Fonda epic. Nor do we get the glamorized, generalized "real-life" performances of Rider in this picture. Arlo is a natural, uneasy, stuttering Arlo-not a hippie-stud (like Fonda) or a hippie-hippie (like Hopper...