Arthur Penn
Alice's Restaurant

Alice's Restaurant is the sixth film by Arthur Penn, an eclectic filmmaker fundamental for his work on genres in Hollywood, which was approaching its "nouvelle vague." Despite many titles of absolute value, a sterile and unemotional yet innovative style, Penn lived in the shadow of the many other (great) names that emerged in American directing between the '60s and '70s. In this transitional time (1969), "Alice's Restaurant" arrives. A film born from an unconventional idea: it is directly inspired by the song of the same name by folksinger Arlo Guthrie, son of the more famous and significant Woody. The long quarter-hour in Arlo's song becomes the mood on which Penn's film moves, telling with images the long story that the songwriter had sung with words and guitar.

It is very complicated to cage this film in a genre, often difficult for many of Penn's works. More than on the "scheme," Penn focuses on an overarching perspective he had already used with equally critical and sociological acuity in the splendid "The Chase" (1966): in that case, he focused on mocking the American bourgeoisie and its false moralism, the inherent desire for private justice of the American people and their rejection of the law as a social regulator, as well as the profound and endemic racism of the whites. In "Alice's Restaurant," the magnifying glass ends on a specific world, the hippie movement of the late sixties: perfectly coinciding, the film is released two days after the closure of Woodstock, the peak and perhaps the end of the hippie movement in America. Penn tells the world of this small hippie community in Massachusetts that divides itself between the deconsecrated church that became their refuge and Alice's restaurant, where "you can get anything you want, except Alice". The story mixes music and drama, hilarity and small gags, a documentary-like gaze and Penn's usual approach that tends to narrate without emotional superstructures. A real film structure is lacking. It transitions from Arlo visiting his sick father Woody in the hospital, maybe singing for him with Pete Seeger, to a narrative made of poverty, drugs, and disillusionment, rejecting Vietnam as a place to "serve the country," riding the wave of the notable refusal (albeit different) from a giant of sport and history like Muhammad Ali.

As Penn has always done throughout his career, here he "plays" with genres by simply diluting them into the film, which is not something that can be inserted into a precise scheme. The deconstruction also applies to the very course of the work, where there is no real beginning and end. Beyond these indeterminate forces, "Alice's Restaurant" seems to have a sort of prophetic look at the upcoming hippie world. Only four months later, the Altamont concert was held, which was supposed to be the second chapter of the epic experienced at Woodstock and which instead will be remembered for the incidents, brawls, and the stabbing and death of young African American Meredith Hunter. For many, it is the end of the hippie dream, already deeply undermined by the blood of Cielo Drive, with everything the media attributed to the hippie world after the Sharon Tate massacre by the Manson family. The long sequence shot with which Penn closes his film, the medium shot with which he captures Alice dressed as a bride seemingly looking to the future, is like the shaman who has seen the end, in some way anticipated by Arlo leaving his friends to sail on his Volkswagen van. A less bloody ending than the one brought to the big screen the same year by "Easy Rider," but the same concept: the dream is over.

7.5