DVD Review: Alice (1990)
A delightful Woody Allen mystical comedy about Alice (Mia Farrow) an upper crust New York wife who is searching for meaning in her life. She comes across Dr. Yang (Keye Luke, Master Po from 1986’s ’Kung Fu: The Movie’, in his final film role) an herbalist who provides her with the herbs to find the answers to all the questions she has always had about her life.
She discovers that her marriage is failing, and her husband (William Hurt) is not the man she thought he was. She falls for a sax player, Joe (Joe Mantegna), and begins an affair that shocks her so-called friends. She makes up with her liberal sister (Blythe Danner) and finds that there was a friendship there all along, but she hadn’t been listening. She sees the ghost of her pre-marriage boyfriend (Alec Baldwin) and spends time getting to relive the moments she had hidden deep within her. She tries to write and finds her muse (Bernadette Peters) who plainly speaks and causes her to come to terms with who her mother really was.
Allen achieves these effects with dramatic stage lighting, and a constantly moving camera that allows us to seem the voyeur just as Alice is when she takes the herb that makes her invisible. This is a well made, interesting and somewhat feminist film about finding out what’s really important.
Grade: B+/A-
