Alice Review: A Tin-Eared Blaxploitation Homage Made from Borrowed Parts

Krystin Ver Linden’s Alice is a baffling and tin-eared treatment of America’s hideous legacy of racism. Ostensibly inspired by real events, this pseudo-Tarantino retread of Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum plays as an inadvertent parody of contemporary liberalism’s fascination with and fetishization of ’70s Black radicalism.

Alice opens on what appears to be a hellish pre-Civil War plantation lorded over by a cruel, imperious master, Paul Bennet (Jonny Lee Miller). Alice (Keke Palmer), a “domestic,” labors in Paul’s house, cooking and serving his meals, keeping his sprawling mansion tidy, and submitting to coerced sex with him every Sunday evening. There are clues that not everything is as it seems—from a Zippo lighter to a copy of Anna Karenina—but the true nature of the situation becomes clear only about 30 minutes into the film when Alice, distraught over the murder of her husband (Sinqua Walls), escapes from the plantation and runs through the forest only to find herself in the middle of a busy freeway in ’70s Georgia.

These opening passages on the plantation are a dreary, monotonous, and underlit slog with nothing novel or interesting to convey about slavery, much less the surreptitious persistence of it more than a century after it was officially abolished by the passage of the 13th Amendment. One might be tempted to charge Ver Linden with indulging in trauma porn except that there’s nothing remotely titillating—or even engaging—about these early scenes. What little visual style is evident here is mostly borrowed from other sources, most pointedly Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, as in a long, lingering shot of Alice tied to a post.

Alice’s plantation scenes, however tedious, at least won’t yield bewildered laughter. The same can’t be said for the rest of the film, which treats the poor, traumatized Alice as, variously, a fish out of water baffled by TV and bologna sandwiches, a genius autodidact who ingests the entire history of civil rights in a single afternoon’s reading, and a blaxploitation heroine set on taking down the racist white patriarchy. Palmer does yeoman’s work trying to ground Alice in some sense of consistent emotional reality, but it’s simply an impossible role to play.

The film pairs up Alice with Frank (Common), a Black Panther turned truck driver who nearly hits Alice with his semi before taking her under his wing. Ver Linden clearly wants to say something about the continuity between the all-consuming terror of slavery and the more insidious racism that the Panthers struggled against, but she never lands on a remotely coherent point. As Alice is reading up on the Emancipation Proclamation, Ver Linden disconcertingly cuts in clips of figures like Malcolm X and Angela Davis. The intent may be to draw a through line between the end of slavery and the civil rights movement, but the effect is to erase nearly a century of Black struggle that preceded the ’60s.

Alice ultimately seems less interested in the message of the Panthers than in their aesthetic, as well as the wider “Black Is Beautiful” movement of the ’70s. One of Alice’s first acts as a free woman is to cut her braids and style her hair like Diana Ross on the cover of Rolling Stone. The implication would be insulting if the scene weren’t so risible in the way it suggests that a woman who’s just escaped slavery and thrust into a world 100 years more advanced than the one she’s known all her life would be interested in nothing so much as a new hairdo.

It’s fitting that Alice comes closest to working in its final moments, when it abandons even the barest pretense of verisimilitude for a vengeance-fueled raid on Paul’s plantation. Ultimately, this sequence is just as clunky and perplexingly scripted as the rest of the film—Alice, for one, is less interested in punishing Paul for enslaving her than for underestimating her intelligence—and it’s an obvious aping of Django Unchained, a point underlined by the fact that Alice takes inspiration for the attack from Coffy, one of Tarantino’s favorite films. Still, it’s only in these last few scenes that Ver Linden finally, belatedly embraces the fundamental pulpiness of her entire project. Alice may have little of substance to say about slavery, Black resistance, the 1970s or anything else, but at the very least it could have had a little more fun saying it.