Ostensibly a
light-hearted adaptation of Arlo Guthrie’s folk-rock, FM classic song, starring
Guthrie himself, nothing could be further from the truth about this
historically accurate, heavy-hearted farewell to 60’s idealism that it actually
turns out to be. Hot on the heels of his blockbuster Bonnie and Clyde, director Arthur Penn creates a heartfelt but
ultimately melancholy look at the youth culture of the era. The story mixes the
actual events of Arlo Guthrie’s life (such as the protracted death of his
father Woody from Huntington’s Chorea) and his life as a struggling
singer/songwriter trying to forge his own identity as an artist with events of
his song “Alice’s Restaurant,” and Penn’s own screenplay to create a
kaleidoscopic view of the late-60’s malaise settling in as the realization that
“selling out” and “growing up” were essentially the same thing.
Arlo Guthrie
himself is entirely charming as he recreates what are undoubtedly many of his
own experiences coming of age with a very hip and famous last name in the
1960’s. We follow as he tries out college in Montana, gets kicked out for
smoking pot and being a long-hair, and then drifts back to the East Coast,
where he lands at the commune-like home of Ray Brock and his wife Alice (she of
the restaurant). Ray and Alice are older than the large group of hippies who
call Ray’s converted church home. They have cultivated a party-time, familial
vibe, where not only are the kids sheltered and fed, but there is an unspoken
understanding that their emotional needs will also be met. This kind of works
out until, like in all utopian communities, the human frailties of the people
at the top start to poison the well. Once Arlo gets back to the Connecticut
commune, the movie takes on a far darker tone. I’m not sure if it was
intentional or not. Like so many the best relics of the 60’s, I find them
unbearably poignant because of the unwitting sadness they portray. The folly of
my own youth and some of the less flattering aspects of the 1960’s subculture
are meant to be seen as sympathetic or even heroic, yet it is their
juxtaposition with the sad realities of the world as it actually exists today
that give the movie its greatest resonance to a modern audience. All the ills
of society exist in Ray and Alice’s world, it’s just that there are no parents
telling you what to do. Ray and Alice nurture and care for the kids, but then
things get a little weird when they sleep with some of them, and look the other
way while another lapses into mental illness and addiction. During all this,
Arlo goes back and forth to a hospital in New Jersey where his father, Woody
Guthrie (played by Joseph Boley) lays mute in painful deterioration. We get a
good sense of Guthrie’s love for, and confusion about his father. Between these
two worlds, Arlo is seeing the disintegration of his biological family and his
adopted group of peers. The film reaches its denouement as Arlo rushes to his
father’s bedside only to miss his death by minutes, at the same time that his
friend is being buried after over-dosing. Director Penn handles this
beautifully and sets a bleak tone that sees the film through to its conclusion.
During the last
third of the movie the majority of the events in Arlo’s famous song take place.
These scenes, involving a small-town cop busting Arlo for littering on
Thanksgiving Day and his subsequent adventures in jail and at the New York City
Draft Board, are light hearted and probably account for the movie’s initial
popularity, and its lasting status as a cult film. However, considering the
last movement of the film, they seem almost irrelevant. The Brocks decide to
renew their wedding vows in an attempt to bring themselves, and their adoptive
family back together. The wedding ceremony starts as a glorious day filled with
music, food, partying and dancing, but things start to turn sadly sinister as
Ray’s drunken behavior becomes increasingly outlandish and hurtful to Alice. As
the embarrassed kids start to drift away, Ray embarks on a futile speech
intended to inspire his following. He panders to their utopian instincts, but
it is too late…the dream is over, as Lennon would proclaim around the same
time.
Alice’s Restaurant ends with a profoundly sad
Alice Brock, standing alone next to her home, now literally and figuratively
devoid of life and happiness. There couldn’t be a more effective metaphor for
the end of the dream that was the 1960’s. While this movie may not succeed at
the somewhat modest and unambitious goal of bringing Guthrie’s cartoonish song
to life, it succeeds like no other film at bringing down the curtain on a
tremendously important, but equally confusing decade in American history.
-
Paul Epstein
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