Version owned: The 2004 Warner DVD release as included in the Martin Scorsese Collection box set (the same one I pulled After Hours from).
Acquired: March 5th, 2015 from Amazon.
Seen before?: No.
The child is telling a joke, his mother the only audience. It's a joke he's heard and is trying to remember, but the details aren't coming out quite right. He gets to a point, realizes he forgot something, runs back to fill in the detail. A pause, a stammer, a restatement, a change. Eventually, he arrives at a punchline, but by then the joke is obliterated, blasted out of recognizable shape by the heedless energy of the teller. His mother, his exasperated mother, evinces no response other than a grim relief that the fumbling attempt at a joke is over... so of course the child thinks she doesn't get it and heads forth to run through it again, expecting that this time she'll laugh. The mother's face crumbles into a burgeoning sob.
This joke - something about a gorilla and some testicles, if I remember correctly - is so important to Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.
Firstly, the joke stands as a representation of realism and this film's curious relationship to it. The telling of the joke is a perfect encapsulation of Tommy, the pre-teen son of Ellen Burstyn's Alice - it's youthful loquaciousness as a verbal steamroller, awkward and oblivious and pointedly vulgar. Tommy is allowed to be unsympathetic and obnoxious to a degree that doesn't often find purchase in Hollywood, where children are often shown as precocious and/or wise beyond their years, and doing so makes him feel uncannily like an actual kid reacting to stressful circumstances. This general truth to character and circumstance revealed in small ways finds its way into every corner of the film - in the embarrassed hesitance of the first meeting between the widowed Burstyn and lounge rat Harvey Keitel, in the pastoral calm of Kris Kristofferson's ranch, in the nervous, frayed desperation of Burstyn at the end of a job hunt and the ever-weakening pronouncements about the bar's lack of a piano by the bar owner whom she's begging for a singing job. There's a thread here where Scorsese, ever the cinematic omnivore, is more or less using the structures of American melodrama to tip his cap towards Italian neo-realism, and the concentration on the economically downtrodden is part and parcel there.
Except that every little touch of realism comes with something to undermine it, to blow it up into something grand and brash. Harvey Keitel turns out to be a room-smashing monster; Kristofferson's ranch has grass rendered in eye-scorching Technicolor green; Burstyn's last stand is accompanied by a swooping fast-track zoom as she hobbles into the darkened bar. Too with the joke - the truth of the scene is a kid being a kid and telling a story while disregarding whether anyone wants to hear it, but the telling is allowed to wend so long that the realism breaks and the duration becomes its own meta-joke. This is appropriate for a sober ground-level drama frayed to bits by the fact that all its characters operate out on the far edge of their emotions. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a woman's-picture in the same way Mean Streets is a crime picture - it has the shape of the thing, but the violent, nervous rhythms juiced into it by its young, excitable director give it an electricity all its own, melodrama tiptoeing just up to the raw edge of miserablism before letting off the gas and sliding back towards less painful outcomes.
Getting to these outcomes, of course, is never easy - a lot of detours and dashed dreams have to occur before these people find their way to where they are. And there it's back to the joke again - it's a perfect microcosm of this film's idea of life as a long wait for an expected destination only to realize that destination isn't on the horizon and life is moving on whether you want it to or not, so now's the time to act. Burstyn spends the film pulling up stakes and running whenever things get sour, towards an imagined future of singing success in Northern California; the hard-fought satisfaction and wisdom of the ending comes when she doesn't run from another series of letdowns. The film finds its truth in the small gestures because the big ones are always revealed to be folly, emotional blowups that solve nothing because after the blowup you still have to exist. There's a beautiful scene near the end of the film between Burstyn and Diane Ladd where the former pours her heart out to the latter in the bathroom of the diner where they both work, and it's moving and fulfilling and helps Burstyn make her ultimate choice about where she's going to go with her life... and in the middle of it Scorsese cuts to Vera, the hapless young waitress who works with the two absent women, trying to manage a lunchtime rush all by her beleaguered self. Life goes on.
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