Alice: Slave-to-Black-Panther in a Day, Nonsense with a Powerful Performance
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C-plus
An undercooked ‘70s-style blaxploitation revenge fantasy with a reverse-Shyamalan plot (the “twist” is up front), Alice is an objectively bad movie wrapped around one great, all-in performance.
Alice is the feature debut of writer/director Krystin Ver Linden, supposedly inspired by the real-life post-slavery practice of Blacks being forced into debt-related servitude. It takes place in 1973, in a secret Antebellum-style plantation in Georgia where the labourers have grown up not knowing that slavery ever ended and believe they live in the 19th Century.
Runaway slave Alice (Keke Palmer) and her rescuer (Common).
This is a promising premise, though one that is not supported by narrative logic. (Do jet planes never fly over rural Georgia?).
When we meet the central character Alice (a magnetic Keke Palmer), she’s marrying a fellow “domestic” Joseph (Gaius Charles) in a ceremony punctuated by the words, “’til distance do you part.”
The message is clear. You can be sold, and separated.
The sadistic master Paul (Jonny Lee Miller) is every slave-owning brute we’ve ever encountered, going back to Simon Legree. Married or not, Paul rapes Alice regularly, and lends his “livestock” out for stud. Hypocritically, he also forces them to listen to his Biblical sermons.
But there are clues there is another world out there, embodied in a Zippo lighter discovered buried in a field.
The brutality is almost perfunctory (the camera turns away from the worst violence) as we await the other narrative shoe drop. After a particularly harrowing experience with Master Paul, Alice takes violent action and runs - directly into the 20th Century.
She is immediately rescued by a trucker named Frank (Common), who assumes she has a concussion because she doesn’t know anything about anything, including her surname. Aware that she will probably end up in a mental institution, he improbably takes her to his home to recover her senses.
Thus, begins the one-day transition of a young slave to a bad-ass ‘70s Black Power warrior.
There are a lot of progressive ideas bouncing around writer Ver Linden’s head, some of them a little too on-the-nose. As Frank drives to his workplace at his bigoted brother’s vineyard, Alice sees migrant workers stooped in familiar toil. Has this land of freedom simply embraced another form of slavery?
But the real stretch comes when Alice is left by herself for an afternoon with an encyclopaedia and a television. Who needs Google when Angela Davis is giving a speech on one channel and Pam Grier is being interviewed on another?
By the time Frank returns home, Alice has absorbed a century of Civil Rights, from the Emancipation Proclamation to Fred Hampton, and also discovered clippings of Frank’s past as a Black activist – a past he’s disowned in frustration and defeat.
A screening of Sanford & Son and a trip to the cinema to see Grier in Coffy, and Alice has been fully radicalized. Armed with only a pair of scissors, she’s even given herself a Diana Ross-inspired ‘fro.
If this sounds ridiculous, it is. But, far beyond anyone else in the movie (including Common, who sometimes seems like he’s sleep-walking), Palmer seems utterly committed to the character and story. She screams from the soul on the “plantation.” Her discovery of the evil charade perpetrated on her elicits pure fury. It’s as if she’s the only cast-member taking the movie seriously.
In the end, Alice is a Midnight Movie that loses its way. The set-up is simple. Black Power gets to kick slavery’s ass. It’s what we all are watching to see. But Alice takes its time getting to the main event, and even that’s a little disappointing.
Alice. Written and directed by Krystin Ver Linden. Starring Keke Palmer, Common, Jonny Lee Miller. Opens Friday, March 18 at the Imagine Cinemas Carlton and Cineplex Odeon Eglinton Town Centre in Toronto, and the VIFF Centre in Vancouver.