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Alice’s Restaurant
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Alice’s Restaurant is a fascinating
artefact of the late 1960s; let’s sidestep any fruitless (and bottomless)
debate as to whether it represents an authentic glimpse into aspects of the American
counterculture (à la Douglas Kramer
& Robert Kramer’s epic Milestones,
1975), or one of Hollywood’s fumbling, desperate attempts, alongside Easy Rider released only one month
earlier in ’69, to appropriate that culture for the mainstream. Purely from the
film itself, we can sense and see that Arthur Penn’s investment in the project
(he’s the credited co-writer with Venable Herndon, died 1999) is intense and
sincere. Like Four Friends (aka Georgia, 1981), which goes back over
some of the same ground, it’s touched with a profound, unsettling melancholia.
First things first, however: Alice’s Restaurant is one of the few films in cinema history based,
narratively, on a long song: Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 folk-comedy-rap-talking-blues
cult hit “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” (thanks to my eldest brother’s taste in
vinyl, it filled some aural space in my childhood). Parts of that song appear
on the soundtrack, and are duly enacted: garbage disposal incident, draft
dodging, freeform wedding. In fact, in a pleasingly Old Hollywood bit of
artifice/condensation/metamorphosis, the song start within the diegesis as a
radio ad for the restaurant … and then gets to narrate (bits of) the unfolding
plot!
Robin Wood, author of a book on Penn, judged (in his
early ‘70s entry on the director for Cinema:
A Critical Dictionary) that these segments “rupture the tone and constitute
a serious flaw”. But I don’t believe it was some “commercial imperative”
ingredient imposed on the director; for better or worse, it’s part of the
film’s mood-mosaic, and an integral part of its very premise. Penn has always
been, from the first, a director of tone-switching and dramatic-comic collage.
The switches (edited by a true master, Dede Allen) just happen to be pretty
extreme, in this case. And maybe the song’s big gag about “father-rapers”, set
against a portrait-shot of an unclothed, effeminate criminal, plays a little
queasily today, or any day …
Arlo Guthrie, it must be said, is a weirdly compelling
presence in the film. (Wood rates his personality, as displayed on screen,
“slight”.) This, in part, has to do with the upfront use of his song: the
confident way he speaks in it, the type of rapid language and surrealist wit,
even the particular kind of music, bears almost no relation to the soft-spoken,
even withdrawn character we observe for the rest of the story, either when he
talks or when he sings (even his live “I wanna ball you, baby” ballad is pretty
pale). As a non-actor, he’s a bit like another, contemporaneous singer, James
Taylor in Two-Lane Blacktop (1971).
Arlo comes on as a “Dylanesque” figure with his tentative parade of shy
glances, slumped postures, affectless walks, weak gestures and verbal reticence;
but this should probably remind us, today, of how much the early Dylan persona
was indeed modelled on Arlo’s mythic Dad, Woody Guthrie. (Indeed, Dylan’s first
volume of Chronicles – will there
ever be another volume? – relates visits to Woody that resonate with scenes of
this film.)
The Woody factor itself undergoes some puzzling semi-to-non-integration.
The film can occasion some cognitive dissonance in the spectator on this level,
perhaps more so today than in August ’69, when Arlo G. had yet to reach his
peak of post-Woodstock fame. Early on, in an excellent scene where our young
hero wanders up to and looks in on a preacher’s tent in session (rather like
many passages of Robert Duvall’s The Apostle, 1997) and
ends up saying to himself ,“Seems like Woody’s road mighta run through here
sometime”, you have to pinch and remind yourself: oh right, that’s Arlo
Guthrie, son of Woody Guthrie!
Subsequently, an actor (Joseph Boley) plays Woody in
hospital during his long, slow process of passing away (in reality, he died in
1967), already beyond speech, and smoking cigarettes with assistance from wife
(Marjorie played by Sylvia Davis) and son. Pete Seeger shows up in a special
guest cameo at the bedside, too, to sing a few jolly tunes (including the zany
number for kids, “Riding In My Car”). But almost nothing is made of Woody’s
“celebrity” until a scene near the very end – and only one other character,
hailing from his era, talks about him admiringly as any kind of legend. Other
than these few moments, nobody in the fiction really addresses Arlo at all as
Woody Guthrie’s son.
As sometimes happens in films about popular music
(such as Purple Rain, 1984), the exact career-status
of the central character is left to float: Arlo mostly seems like a relative
nobody travelling around and gigging solo at a few homely bars, but a young
groupie wants to “make it” with him because he’s bound for the glory of “a
record album”. In the film’s finale, a music career seems like the last thing
he’s heading toward as he goes down the road with his new partner, Mari-chan
(Tina Chen).
So much for the “tonal” discrepancies (tonal problems has become one of the
most wretched terms of abuse in the contemporary film-reviewing lexicon – as if
monotone was the preferred pitch of all things!). What is Alice’s Restaurant really about? More than a simple (even naïve)
inquiry into a specific slice of the counter-culture – not much militant
politics here, more the “dropping out”, passively resisting and
wandering-around-old-weird-America side of the ‘60s ethos – it’s a film of transmissions. Between generations,
between cultures. This theme is inscribed (as Pascal Kané would say) doubly: in the father-son Guthrie relation, and
especially in the passage of the central church location from sacred to
“desacralised” (the scene of the final mass held for a dwindling handful of old
folk is indelible – and true to my own adolescent memories of Catholic churches
in the Australian ‘70s!).
In neither case is it a matter of outright rebellion
or rejection (beyond the clever scene of a stuffy, repressive, music class with
all students playing silently through headphones and an obstreperous teacher
flicking between channels). The modern folk-rock-blues of Arlo aims to revivify
his Dad’s legacy, just as the “new church” of the hippies aims to revivify the
beauty and sacredness of existence itself – an emphasis made clear via the hip
priest (Lee Hays, another folkie figure) officiating at the wedding of Alice
(Pat Quinn) and Ray (James Broderick). As Jean-Pierre Coursodon (1935-2020)
& Bertrand Tavernier (1941-2021) noted in their long entry on Penn in 50 Years of American Cinema, his bands
of outsiders tend to express a “nostalgia for family” as a refuge against the
world’s chaos, a desire to reformulate or replace the family unit rather than
destroy it altogether. Even those in Alice’s
Restaurant whom Wood identifies as “authority figures” – Woody and the
local cop Officer Obie from the song (played by Obie/William Obanhein himself
who decided, if he was to be made out as a fool, he might as well do it himself
rather than hand the job to somebody else) – are not really invested with much
grey eminence; they are flickering, diminished, whimsical presences. The Old
World is passing, but it’s not hateful per
se.
But even the best of the New World dribbles out and
goes sour; the ideals do not hold, however much Penn can illuminate their
ephemeral grace and poetry. As Dylan later sang: everything is broken. Or, as
Wood remarks, the film’s overall and general “movement is towards
disintegration”, embodied in Ray’s increasing hysteria at the end of the
wedding scene (a mood-change that anticipates the drugged-out club catastrophe
in Four Friends). I don’t, however,
agree with the implied interpretation that it is an excess of American individualism
(and thus a lack of collective politics) that sinks this countercultural ship. Penn
seems to grasp it as an inevitable decline, for all-too-human reasons.
Penn’s focus is intriguing: the only truly important
things happen on the level of personal relationships – love, sex, affectionate
touching (there are many wonderful, throwaway details belonging to that last category).
Certainly not on the macro level of Vietnam War or the presiding government, things
which are so peripheral here as to be almost incidental. Penn as a director
(and the master of a certain modern manner of mise en scène) becomes especially eloquent whenever he represents
characters – mostly male characters – gazing in wistful agony at the evidence
of their beloved’s sexual infidelity (that’s a highpoint of Four Friends), or (in a memorable scene
here) trying to get a grasp of that evidence, all in the context of a general, Jules et Jim-style, free-love
bohemianism. Great to dream of it, hard to live it: Penn’s verdict cuts both
ways.
The place of sex in this story is, in fact, far from
ecstatic, one fogged-up vignette aside. Arlo himself refuses it (to three
different women of three different generations!) more often than he enjoys it,
and sexual compulsion – as well as
the female assumption of and acquiescence to the male libido – registers more
as a sad curse than an overflowing joy. Little wonder, then, that Alice’s Restaurant has its startling
“Cassavetes moment”, when the deframed paroxysm of male and female bodies in
intimate conflict resembles any scene from Faces (1968). It’s the Husbands (1970) vibe: sex is a sad,
sorry, messy, ever-regretted business, a collision-catastrophe zone between the
all-too-separated sexes.
Beyond that general wind-down into melancholia,
there’s only the doomed-from-the-start figure of the “mobile artist” Shelley
(Michael McClanathan, whose sparse IMDb credits span only three years 1968-71,
before he adopted the profession of bagpiper!) hooked on heroin, his image sprayed
(a bit bizarrely) on a giant, black-and-white, home-movie screen (Penn couldn’t
resist the shot of Alice defiantly standing in front of that projection!), and
given to hell-bent, death-driven spins on his ultra-loud motorcycle. Plus a
stunningly strong (not to mention prescient) note of feminist discontent that
seems true to what one can read of the real-life disintegration of Alice and
Ray’s marriage: in the improvised world of this “alternative” restaurant, women
have to do all the cooking while the men sing, goof off and party on. The real
Alice Brock, paid a helpful $12,000 for the use of her name by the production
and a recurring extra in several scenes, has since frequently complained to
journalists that the film turned her into an “object”, and that both the
affairs with other men and the heroin angle are purely fictional inventions on
Penn & Herndon’s part. But, for all that, Quinn is extraordinary in the
role; it rates among Penn’s best collaborations with a performer, an area in
which (as a leading participant in the Actors Studio) he was especially noted.
And that final shot! As photographed by Michael Nebbia
(the little-known director of Life Study,
1973), it’s incredible: Alice out front of the church, wedding veil moving
slowly and casting its shadow in the breeze, as the camera tracks back – and
simultaneously zooms in on her (thus creating the “zolly” effect) – and moves screen-left in some
hard-to-discern shape or angle. Just over two minutes in total, very carefully
and cleverly prepared for in the interplay that proceeds it – Alice is already
in place throughout, standing stock still, not joining in the goodbyes for Arlo
and Mari-chan. The arrangement of the big shot is strange and impossible, and
poignant exactly for that reason: Alice looks into the camera, as if locking
into the gaze of Arlo in the departing car – but (we well surmise), by the time
a few seconds have passed, he’s neither nearby nor looking back. It’s another
kind of farewell ceremony taking place, sublimely cinematic and possible only
on that level of elevated address.
The shot lands somewhere between total virtuosity and
touching spontaneity – the camera wobbles a bit along its path.
Unlike most similar moments in contempo cinema (some of them occasionally
poorly executed, even in Goodfellas, 1990), this
one embraces an added factor of disorientation by having foreground objects pop
in and out of the field of vision as it moves. But when Arlo’s final reprise of
the theme tune drops out altogether, and we’re just left looking at Alice in
absolute silence for what seems like an empty eternity, the sadness and
disintegration are complete: it’s pure emotion, nothing much like the geometric
marvel of camera movement at the close of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975 – also a great final
shot, but for very different reasons).
Why this amazing shot from Alice’s Restaurant didn’t make it into Histoire(s) du
cinéma, I’ll never know.
MORE Penn: Target, Bonnie and Clyde © Adrian Martin 9 November 2020 |
