Alice (1990)

Woody Allen turned to making 'serious' films because he ran out of things to do in movies that were supposed to be just funny. Now, some ten years later, he's in another dead end, and this picture – which is full of interesting or even enjoyable things – is just another instance of Allen's wriggling around on the hook. Mia Farrow, so firmly established as Woody's Catholic alter ego that she here seems to be doing an impersonation of his schnook performance, is Alice, a dissatisfied uppercrust New York housewife who is stuck with wooden hubby William Hurt and a mild case of the restless hots for sax player Joe Mantegna. She visits acupuncture guru Keye Luke, in his last role, and is given various magic potions of a Lewis Carroll nature (underlining the fairytale heroine theme, Alice has a sister called Dorothy), which enable her to flirt like a vixen, become invisible, fly around with the ghost (Alec Baldwin) of a former lover, and make strange men at a party fall for her.

It's an episodic, quixotic movie, with the usual perfect performances – including neat cameos from Cybill Shepherd, Blythe Danner and Judy Davis, and a dynamite scene for Bernadette Peters as a muse – and a smattering of genuinely funny or poignant moments. But there's still a pall of heaviness that hangs over Allen's gloomy wannabe Ibsen manner, dropping lumps of stodge into the soufflé, which triggers a remarkably unconvincing ending and a general feeling not only of pointlessness but of déjà vu. Allen has done everything here before – magic, adultery, New York pretensions, ghosts – in simpler, more affecting, funnier films. Not only were Allen's early, funny films better, so were his earlier miserable ones.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: The Good Times, issue unknown.

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