Mark Reviews Movies: ALICE (2022)

Alice, Roadside Attractions, Vertical Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 17, 2022

With Alice, first-time writer/director Krystin Ver Linden pays obvious homage to the Blaxploitation genre of the 1970s. Beyond that sense of style and the big twist at the core of its premise, the movie doesn't say or do much apart from the obvious, and in terms of that twist, the effort ultimately feels as if it's exploiting a real, infuriating, and mostly overlooked history.

This is, as Ver Linden announces at the start, "inspired by a true story," and the plot definitely takes its time to get to the basic crux of it. At first, it appears that we are witnessing the world of a plantation in Antebellum Georgia. Alice (Keke Palmer), a "domestic" who works in the main house of the farm, marries Joseph (Gaius Charles), an enslaved person who works the fields, in a wedding service in a confined cabin on the plantation grounds.

Paul (Jonny Lee Miller), the owner of the place, is unhappy with that relationship. He forces Alice into his bedroom some nights, and in order to take Joseph out of the picture, he arranges a twisted "breeding" arrangement with a neighboring farm. Joseph is making plans to escape, despite the warnings from his family and the other dozen or so enslaved people on the plantation of hunters in the night. If no one else will leave, he wants to ensure that he and Alice do escape in order to have a chance at a life of freedom together.

Ver Linden treats this place and apparent time as the full reality of the situation, and while the way in which the story lingers on physical violence and an overwhelming sense of despair may be accurate, it's about as much as we learn about these characters. That the story on the plantation doesn't matter as much to the ultimate turn of this story makes it feel all the more discomforting later.

There are hints that something isn't quite as it seems on the farm. One man tells the story of a stranger who arrived there decades ago, and when Joseph digs up the visitor's grave, he discovers a strange object that we immediately recognize as something that shouldn't exist in this era. Alice hears voices coming from a room where only one person is, and the static sound beneath the talking is definitely familiar to us.

The movie's game, obviously, is that this isn't the Antebellum era, and indeed, when Alice does escape on her own, she ends up on a highway, where she's almost hit by a semi-truck. The driver, a kind man named Frank (Common), picks up Alice, who has passed out, and drives her to a nearby hospital. On the way, Frank reveals that it's actually 1973, and Alice, of course, has a lot of history to learn.

Potentially, there's a lot here for the movie to address and confront, from the idea of a woman who goes from believing she's property to learning she is entirely free in an instant, to the sheer amount of historical and political developments that have occurred between these two periods, and to the terrible truth, not only of the movie's premise, but also of a real history in which African Americans in the United States continued to be enslaved even after the Civil War. One won't learn about that last part from Ver Linden's movie, which ignores those true stories for a shallow exercise in a fish-out-of-water comedy, a tribute to the period of the '70s, and, eventually, a revenge tale directly inspired by the movies that the filmmaker is trying to imitate.

Most of it is a lot wheel-spinning, as Alice gets a crash course in key moments like the Emancipation Proclamation and events such as the civil rights movement, attempts to find the location of the plantation, and tries to convince Frank, whose activist mother died in a psychiatric institution after an unjust arrest, to put aside his disillusionment and finally do some good. It's strange and unfortunate how much time Ver Linden's screenplay spends on the mechanics of Alice finding the farm and coming up with a plan (not to mention learning about and adopting contemporary style and culture, which gives Palmer a chance to really shine as a tough, vengeful force), only to rush through the far more intriguing character and political elements that are right there, waiting to be explored and examined.

There's a decent and potentially potent conceit at the heart of Alice, as well as some necessary indignation that should be aimed at real-world history that inspired. This movie, though, doesn't take advantage of the former and, regrettably, doesn't seem too interested in the reality of the latter.

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