If Alice's Restaurant were to be made today it would most likely be filmed in a much grainier, true-to-life fashion, cinema verite wed to the modern taste for close-ups and hand-held camera. It's a style that adds an immediacy to the subjects that it films and that is something that is badly lacking from this film. Alice's Restaurant stands now as nothing more than a curio, failing completely to capture or convey any sense of how life was like for the draft-dodging members of America's counter-culture. The best films that set themselves up as a form of social document succeed because they always make the era they have captured come alive; they give you a taste and a feel so true to the times that it is almost tangible. Alice's Restaurant simply points the camera at a group of people who possess ill-defined motivation and an almost complete lack of direction: change the hairstyles and the clothes and what takes place on screen could be taking place anywhere at any time in the past fifty years.
Arlo Guthrie is no actor, but he's actually quite good in this because you do feel that, while he's obviously acting, he's also trying to be himself and so you get some insight into the man. He's invited to have sex by four different women in this film which is a bit of a stretch to be honest, but other than that he's entirely believable, despite lacking much presence on the screen. Patricia Quinn exudes an earthy vitality as Alice, while James Broderick as her husband Ray seems strangely at odds with the rest of the cast. Maybe it's his age or the cowboy-ish clothes, which make him look something like a good ol' boy, but he never really seems to fit in and fails to convince as the kind of man to whom Alice would be married.
For all its counter-culture credentials the film, and its characters, ultimately resort to the most conventional of social traditions. The Brocks live in an old church, long abandoned by most of its ageing congregation, and seek to salvage their relationship by getting married once again while, at their reception, Ray drunkenly bemoans the gradual dispersion of their friends, with whom he wishes to found a commune. That's love, marriage, family and friendship,themes that, while not wholly exclusive from the social group the film examines, nevertheless make an unlikely topic. Maybe that explains why, like most of the rest of us, the hippie generation have today turned into their middle-class suburbanite parents.
Arlo Guthrie is no actor, but he's actually quite good in this because you do feel that, while he's obviously acting, he's also trying to be himself and so you get some insight into the man. He's invited to have sex by four different women in this film which is a bit of a stretch to be honest, but other than that he's entirely believable, despite lacking much presence on the screen. Patricia Quinn exudes an earthy vitality as Alice, while James Broderick as her husband Ray seems strangely at odds with the rest of the cast. Maybe it's his age or the cowboy-ish clothes, which make him look something like a good ol' boy, but he never really seems to fit in and fails to convince as the kind of man to whom Alice would be married.
For all its counter-culture credentials the film, and its characters, ultimately resort to the most conventional of social traditions. The Brocks live in an old church, long abandoned by most of its ageing congregation, and seek to salvage their relationship by getting married once again while, at their reception, Ray drunkenly bemoans the gradual dispersion of their friends, with whom he wishes to found a commune. That's love, marriage, family and friendship,themes that, while not wholly exclusive from the social group the film examines, nevertheless make an unlikely topic. Maybe that explains why, like most of the rest of us, the hippie generation have today turned into their middle-class suburbanite parents.