Alice (1990)
Film Overview
A wealthy Manhattan housewife visits a Chinatown herbalist about a persistent backache and discovers that the problem may have much more to do with the life she has built than with her spine.
Mia Farrow plays Alice Tate, married for sixteen years to wealthy businessman Doug and living a comfortable Upper East Side life filled with shopping, beauty treatments, school runs and social engagements.
Alice becomes increasingly fascinated by Joe Ruffalo, a divorced jazz saxophonist she sees while collecting her children from school. Her attraction to him produces guilt, anxiety and the physical discomfort that eventually takes her to Dr Yang, a Chinatown herbalist played by Keye Luke.
Dr Yang decides that Alice’s problem lies with her heart rather than her back. A series of mysterious herbs then strips away the defences around her personality, making her unusually uninhibited, invisible and even capable of communicating with the ghost of Eddie, a former lover played by Alec Baldwin.
Fantasy becomes the method by which Alice begins rediscovering the ambitions and values she abandoned after marriage. Bernadette Peters appears as her Muse, Gwen Verdon as her mother, Judy Davis as Joe’s former wife Vicki and Cybill Shepherd as successful television producer Nancy Brill.
Carlo Di Palma gives New York an unusually polished and romantic look, moving between the Upper East Side, Central Park, Chinatown and Manhattan’s restaurants and shops as Alice’s familiar city gradually becomes unfamiliar to her.
Watch Alice
My Review
A woman who has everything except a life that feels like her own
What makes Alice so enjoyable is the way Woody Allen uses fantasy to expose an extremely ordinary dissatisfaction. Alice Tate does not initially appear trapped. She appears fortunate.
She has money, children, a beautiful home and a husband who has provided the kind of material security many people would envy. Her days are filled with appointments, shops, exercise and conversations with other wealthy women. Nothing is obviously missing until Alice begins noticing Joe.
The attraction is important less because Joe is necessarily the great love of her life than because desire suddenly proves she is capable of wanting something she did not plan. Her life has become so thoroughly organised around being Doug’s wife and the mother of their children that wanting something simply because she wants it feels almost revolutionary.
The backache is a wonderfully literal metaphor. Alice’s body has started objecting before her conscious mind has found the language to explain why.
Alice thinks something is wrong with her back. Dr Yang immediately understands that the life pressing on her is the real problem.
Mia Farrow gives Alice a nervous, slightly breathless quality that makes her perfect for the transformation ahead. Alice is not someone who has spent years openly resenting her marriage. She has spent years becoming increasingly good at performing a role she once chose.
That distinction matters. Doug did not kidnap her into this life. Alice was attracted to wealth, comfort and the security he represented. She also gave up ambitions of her own, including an interest in costume design, without fully recognising what the decision would eventually cost her.
William Hurt plays Doug with exactly enough distance. He does not need to become a cartoonishly dreadful husband because the problem is larger than one bad marriage. Alice has allowed somebody else’s definition of a good life to replace the question of what she wanted to do with her own.
The film’s fantasy elements therefore do not provide an escape from reality so much as remove the social mechanisms that normally keep Alice behaving acceptably inside it.
The herbs do not turn Alice into somebody else. They temporarily remove the habits that stop her being the person already underneath.
The first potion is perhaps the funniest example. Alice suddenly becomes uninhibited around Joe, saying and doing things that would ordinarily be impossible for her. Joe Mantegna is excellent because Joe is attracted to this confident woman without realising how astonished Alice herself is by the performance.
Their attraction has a genuine sweetness. Joe is a musician rather than a businessman, divorced rather than conventionally settled, and his life appears to contain exactly the spontaneity Alice feels she has lost. Naturally, some of that is projection.
The Central Park Zoo meeting is a perfect Allen romantic location because Alice has already imagined it before she can make herself go through with it. The reality of adultery proves much harder than the fantasy of it, and her Catholic guilt returns almost immediately.
That mixture of desire and guilt drives much of the comedy. Alice wants to become less inhibited while still retaining the moral identity through which she has understood herself for years.
Alice does not simply want Joe. She wants to become the version of herself who could want Joe without immediately apologising for it.
The invisibility potion is one of the film’s best devices because Allen turns a familiar fantasy into something psychologically useful. Alice can finally observe other people without having to perform for them.
At first she uses invisibility to follow Joe and discovers his continuing involvement with Vicki. Later she shares the potion with him and the fantasy becomes more playful, but invisibility eventually reveals something much more important about Alice’s own marriage.
She hears friends gossiping about Doug’s affairs and then sees the truth for herself. The woman who had been overwhelmed with guilt for merely desiring somebody else discovers that her supposedly stable marriage has contained deceptions she never allowed herself to suspect.
It is a clever reversal. Alice needed magic to see the reality she had been living inside all along.
Invisibility gives Alice the ability to see other people clearly for the first time because nobody knows she is there to impress.
Alec Baldwin’s Eddie introduces a more melancholy form of fantasy. He is the ghost of the man Alice loved before Doug, an artist whose recklessness once made a secure future with him impossible.
Eddie is not simply the answer Alice should have chosen years earlier. His early death and instability make that interpretation too easy. What he represents is the part of Alice’s life in which passion, risk and imagination were still active possibilities.
Their flight over the city and return to memories of their relationship are among the film’s loveliest sequences. Fantasy allows Alice to revisit a choice without pretending it can actually be undone.
That is something the film shares with Another Woman. Both protagonists are confronted by versions of lives they might have lived. The difference is tonal: Marion experiences those alternatives as painful memory, while Alice’s appear through magic, ghosts and comic invention.
Eddie is not the life Alice should have chosen. He is the reminder that she once knew how it felt to choose something for reasons other than safety.
The film becomes even more playful when Alice tries to recover her own creative ambitions. Cybill Shepherd’s Nancy has built the sort of career Alice abandoned, and their scenes are deliberately uncomfortable. Alice’s ideas for television are vague because wanting a creative life and having something to say are not automatically the same thing.
Bernadette Peters appearing as Alice’s Muse is exactly the right comic response. Alice wants inspiration to arrive like another magic potion, but the Muse is not particularly impressed by what she has produced.
Gwen Verdon’s appearance as Alice’s dead mother complicates things further. Her mother also gave up an artistic career for marriage and defends the choice. There is therefore no simple generational lesson that says domestic life was a mistake and professional ambition would have solved everything.
Alice has to decide what matters to her now, not prove that one universal model of womanhood was correct all along.
Alice has spent years assuming there must be a correct life to choose. The film gradually teaches her that the choice has to be hers before it can mean anything.
Keye Luke’s Dr Yang functions almost like the director of Alice’s emotional education. Each new herb creates the circumstances in which another hidden part of her life becomes visible. The conception belongs very clearly to the period in which the film was made, but within the story his role is remarkably precise.
He never simply tells Alice what decision to make. Even the final love potion presents her with a choice rather than an answer. She can make Doug or Joe love her completely, but by then the idea of manufactured devotion has begun to look much less attractive.
The accident involving the potion at the Christmas party makes the point comic rather than philosophical. Suddenly numerous men profess their devotion, and Alice discovers how meaningless love becomes when choice has been removed from it.
The magic has done its work. She no longer wants a spell that will make somebody else change. She needs to decide what she intends to change herself.
By the time Dr Yang offers Alice the power to control love, she has finally learned why love without freedom would be worthless.
Carlo Di Palma makes New York unusually beautiful here. This is not the severe city of Another Woman or the moral darkness of Crimes and Misdemeanors. Madison Avenue, Central Park, restaurants and shops are photographed with a polished romantic quality that initially reflects the privilege of Alice’s world.
As the story progresses, the same city begins offering alternatives. Chinatown leads her to Dr Yang. Central Park becomes connected to Joe. Manhattan’s streets become a place where invisibility lets her observe lives usually hidden behind social appearances.
Santo Loquasto’s interiors emphasise the scale of Alice’s comfort, making her dissatisfaction more interesting rather than less. She is not fleeing poverty or obvious deprivation. She is leaving a life filled with beautiful things that have stopped answering the question of what those things are for.
The film is therefore visually generous towards the world Alice is questioning. Allen does not need it to look ugly in order for her to leave it.
Alice’s Manhattan is beautiful. That is what makes her dissatisfaction interesting: beauty and comfort have not answered the question of how she wants to live.
Music helps maintain that polished surface. Jackie Gleason’s Limehouse Blues opens the film and returns in another version, while Artie Shaw, Erroll Garner, Thelonious Monk, Count Basie and other recordings create a soundtrack that moves between elegance and jazz.
The music also connects naturally with Joe, whose life as a saxophonist represents one of Alice’s first encounters with a world organised around artistic work rather than wealth. Again, the film is careful not to romanticise him completely.
Joe eventually chooses to return to Vicki. Alice’s fantasy that leaving Doug might automatically produce a new life with Joe collapses at almost exactly the moment her marriage does.
That is essential. If Alice simply exchanged one man for another, the entire journey would become much smaller than the film has suggested.
Joe begins Alice’s awakening, but he cannot be its conclusion. Otherwise she would merely trade one life built around a man for another.
The ending therefore makes a bold choice. Alice leaves Doug, but she does not run to Joe. She spends time working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta before returning to New York and creating a much simpler life with her children.
The Mother Teresa element can feel broad, particularly because Alice had idealised that kind of selflessness earlier in the film, but I like the fundamental idea behind it. Her transformation eventually has to extend beyond romance.
She has spent years in an environment where almost every need was met by money and almost every day revolved around herself and a small social circle. Service gives her an entirely different scale by which to measure what a useful life might mean.
When she returns, she has less materially and seems to possess more of herself. The ending does not argue that everybody should abandon the Upper East Side and work in Calcutta. It argues that Alice has finally made a choice whose value is not determined by status, fear or somebody else’s expectations.
Alice begins surrounded by luxury and unable to imagine what she wants. She ends with less and finally knows why she chose it.
Mia Farrow deserved the recognition she received for the performance. Alice changes enormously without ever becoming unrecognisable. The shy, guilty woman from the opening remains visible inside the more independent person at the end.
That continuity is what keeps the fantasy grounded. The herbs can make her invisible, uninhibited or capable of talking to ghosts, but the real transformation happens much more slowly. Alice learns to make decisions without magic.
Alice is lighter than the two films immediately before it, but it belongs to the same period of Allen’s work. Another Woman, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Alice are all concerned with people discovering that the story they have told themselves about their lives is incomplete.
Alice simply gets the most entertaining medicine.
Cast and Characters
Mia Farrow
A wealthy Manhattan wife whose mysterious backache begins a much larger examination of the life she has built.
Joe Mantegna
A divorced jazz saxophonist whose presence awakens desires Alice has spent years suppressing.
William Hurt
Alice’s wealthy husband, whose comfortable marriage proves to contain secrets of its own.
Keye Luke
The Chinatown herbalist whose unusual treatments repeatedly force Alice to confront hidden parts of herself.
Judy Davis
Joe’s former wife, whose unresolved relationship with him complicates Alice’s romantic hopes.
Alec Baldwin
Alice’s former lover, returning as a ghost and reconnecting her with a more impulsive part of her past.
Bernadette Peters
The personification of creative inspiration, summoned when Alice tries to recover the artistic ambitions she abandoned.
Cybill Shepherd
A successful television producer whose career reminds Alice of possibilities she once surrendered.
Gwen Verdon
A figure from Alice’s past who complicates the assumption that sacrificing an artistic career for marriage must always be a mistake.
Jazz and standards give Alice’s Manhattan its polished musical surface
The soundtrack ranges from Jackie Gleason and Artie Shaw to Erroll Garner, Thelonious Monk and Count Basie, reflecting both the elegance of Alice’s social world and the jazz culture associated with Joe.
Limehouse Blues
Jackie Gleason’s recording opens the film, immediately linking its sophisticated musical world with the Chinatown setting that will become central to Alice’s transformation. A different recording by Ambrose and His Orchestra is heard later.
Romance, jazz and a city seen through different eyes
Erroll Garner, Jackie Gleason, Artie Shaw, Thelonious Monk, Count Basie and Wayne King are among the performers represented on the soundtrack.
The selection moves easily between lush popular standards and jazz, fitting a story in which Alice’s orderly social world collides with Joe’s more improvisational life.
The Way You Look Tonight
Erroll Garner’s performance brings one of Allen’s recurring favourite standards into Alice’s romantic New York.
Darn That Dream
Performed by Thelonious Monk, the standard suits a film constantly moving between fantasy, desire and waking reality.
Alice Blue Gown
Wayne King and His Orchestra perform the song whose title gives it an obvious playful connection to the film’s heroine.
Caravan
Erroll Garner’s recording adds another strong jazz voice to a soundtrack filled with music from an earlier New York.
Locations
Alice moves through a particularly elegant version of New York, from the Upper East Side and Central Park to Chinatown and Midtown.
Location work was combined with interiors at Kaufman Astoria Studios, including Alice’s carefully designed home.
Doyers Street
The narrow Chinatown street provides the setting around Dr Yang’s herbal practice and a world far removed from Alice’s usual Manhattan routine.
Central Park Zoo
The penguin house becomes closely associated with Alice’s fantasies and hesitant relationship with Joe.
Rhinelander Mansion
The mansion at 867 Madison Avenue is used during Alice’s encounters with the luxurious shopping world she knows so well.
Barbetta
The historic Italian restaurant appears during the invisibility sequences, becoming one of the film’s distinctive Midtown interiors.
64 Perry Street
The Perry Street address was among the Manhattan locations used during the lengthy New York production.
Kaufman Astoria Studios
Studio work included major interiors, allowing Santo Loquasto to create the polished domestic spaces central to Alice’s affluent world.
Awards and Recognition
Best Original Screenplay Nomination
Woody Allen received an Academy Award nomination for his original screenplay.
Best Actress — Mia Farrow
Farrow won the National Board of Review award for Best Actress for her performance as Alice.
Mia Farrow Nomination
Farrow was nominated for Best Actress in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy.
Original Screenplay Nomination
Allen received a Writers Guild nomination for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.
Best Foreign Film Nomination
The film received a César nomination for Best Foreign Film.
Mia Farrow Nomination
Farrow was nominated for Best Foreign Actress for her performance.