Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

A typically underwhelming early effort from Martin Scorsese, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore follows single mother Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn) as she attempts to start over with her young son (Alfred Lutter’s Tommy) after the death of her husband. Scorsese, working from Robert Getchell’s script, kicks Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore off with a bizarre yet attention-grabbing Wizard of Oz-inspired opening sequence, with the entertainingly bonkers nature of this sequence hardly preparing the viewer for the dull, frequently interminable drama that follows. The overly familiar nature of Getchell’s screenplay is certainly the most obvious source of the film’s downfall, as the been-there-done-that character-study vibe is compounded by Lutter’s seriously annoying performance and an ongoing emphasis on thoroughly tedious episodes (eg Alice attempts to find a job, Alice attempts to find a man, etc, etc). Burstyn’s solid (yet often histrionic) turn as the title character is ultimately rendered moot by the pervasively uninteresting atmosphere, and it is, in the end, impossible to discern just what drew Scorsese to the hackneyed material in the first place.

*1/2 out of ****