Scorsese for girls

Martin Scorsese built a glittering career out of the portrayal of machismo and male violence in the mean streets of New York City. But in the early seventies he took a short break from that to portray a 35 year old widow as she journeys to self realization across the southern States, bantering with her lippy kid along the way.

Martin Scorsese, feminist filmmaker, who'd have thought it? To be fair, it wasn't really his idea. He was hired by actress Ellen Burstyn. Burstyn felt inspired by the woman's movement, and Alice doesn't live here anymore was a project she really wanted to do. She was the one to suggest the script and the director to Warner bros. A pretty smart move on her part, too, cause her portrayal of Alice won her an Oscar, and it gave us a real and complex woman to watch, one who is the star of her own real and complex story.

Alice has been criticized by feminists at the time for being not feminist enough. The problem being that Alice, in the midst of redefining her life and her relationship with her son, living in a seedy motel and working as a waitress in a hellhole diner in Tucson, at one point sighs that she finds she really can't live without a man. And that she liked having a husband because, even though she was afraid of him, he made her feel like he took care of her. (Even though he didn't, really, she adds.) In the end, because she falls for a Tucson farmer, Alice abandons her original plan of going back to Monterey, the town of her happy childhood, and becoming a singer there. After all, a girl can sing anywhere, she reasons, so she might as well stay in Tucson and make a go of it with that cute farmer.

While it is understandable that the seventies feminists needed their independent women on screen to shake off their traditional roles and follow their own dreams in a more ruthless and radical way than Alice does, it's exactly Alice's ambivalent attitude towards these kind of dilemma's that makes her character still so interesting and believable today. Actually I kind of like her choice. After all (warning, cliche ahead) life is all about compromises, and mainly: aren't we all suckers for the girl getting the guy, especially one who can pull off a beard, and who throws in a nice ranch and a couple of horses. Please check out Alice, she really deserves to be more than 'that one Scorsese movie you have never seen'. And Scorsese-traditionalists, don't worry, you won't be disappointed. Harvey Keitel  is in it too. And he has a knife.