I watched
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore again the other night. It has that feeling of being heavily influenced by a studio system, although I'm not sure what the story is on the making of this particular film. It's full of manufactured cute moments and mom/son banter. It made me wonder what it will be like to watch a Meg Ryan flick like
French Kiss twenty years from now. It probably won't be all that entertaining. However, Scorsese's subtext really starts to take over the second half of the picture and my wondering about Meg Ryan shifted to wondering about my own priorities in life.
Alice is a single mom realizing she's never actually put into words what it is she really wants in life. And, like most single moms, so much of her life is spent keeping her head above water and going after what she wants seems like a luxury reserved for other women.
By the time Kris Kristofferson's character is in the story, the characters are really rounding out and I was caught. What Kristofferson's character really does is make Alice take a hard look at what the world wants from her versus what she wants for herself. It's a double edged sword: part of the world may want her to be the proverbial housewife and the other part wants her to be an independent woman making it all on her own. The truth is somewhere in between. She wants independence, but she also has found for a man she wants to be with. So what doe she do?
What I love about flicks like this is how early on I project onto a character what I think the right path for them is. What Scorsese does in
Alice is remind me that I am an extremely poor judge at deciding what is right and what is wrong for another person.
On a completely different note, how the hell did the TV series I grew up watching,
Alice, ever get so far away from its origins in this film?