Alice
VERTICALWith its roots firmly in black power movements, black cinema – particularly blaxploitation films – found a home in the liberated cinema of the 70s, displaying black characters and stories in ways that still resonate strongly today. With her debut film, Alice, writer/director Kristen Ver Linden tries to display this period of time with varying degrees of success.
Alice follows the title character (Keke Palmer), who after having her husband killed and escaping a slave plantation run by a maniacal owner (Johnny Lee Miller) discovers it’s not the 19th century but the early 1970s. Picked up off the highway by trucker Frank (Common), a former black panther now working for his brother’s farm, Alice discovers the world and an empowerment that leads her to going back to the plantation to save those still there.
The difference of Alice compared to something like Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman is that Ver Linden’s film plays things with absolute seriousness. While both feature many images of black people and tie to the black empowerment movements of the era, Lee’s film treats its true story subject matter with seriousness but plenty of playfulness that helps the film draw out its blaxploitation inspirations, something Alice doesn’t even attempt. The seriousness helps ground the film – its story is inspired by true events – but that seriousness also causes the film to become a tale of different stories, with the first two acts playing as a typical slave drama before turning into a story of black empowerment in the 70s before becoming a revenge film in its third act. While the ending may feel inevitable, the film’s script does very little in building towards its want to be crowd pleasing ending, instead trying to be a character study before using a montage of Alice seeing Coffy to set up the characters and films shift in attitude.
One aspect the film finds much of its strength in is its performances. Keke Palmer gives a emotional and often commanding performance as Alice. Palmer plays the role somewhat quietly, strongly utilising her eyes to convey much of the character’s emotion but still having a strong control of dialogue scenes, particularly in a scene where she’s explaining to Common’s Frank that she had been a slave. Common delivers a serviceable performance as Frank, but with the script often leaving characters making somewhat illogical choices, even a serviceable performance can’t ultimately save the character. Johnny Lee Miller’s Paul Bennett tries to channel Fassbender in 12 Years a Slave, playing up the ugliness of the character and being a strong presence when on screen while Alicia Witt – as his ex wife Rachel – gets one of the film’s standout scenes when Alice confronts her character in a diner. But outside these few performances, the remainder of the cast is mostly wasted, with Gaius Charles as Alice’s husband, Joseph, being a great example of the film’s often wasted potential, as his character is “killed” off before showing up inexplicably in the films final moments.
Though it features a strong lead performance from Keke Palmer, thanks mostly to a weak script that doesn’t know what it wants to be, Alice is a film at a loss of a clear identity.
