ALICE
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
**1/2
Woody Allen goes into a weird wonderland in this fantasy romance starring Mia Farrow, in her eleventh consecutive Allen film. Here, she plays a disenchanted housewife who has lived off her husband's money without ever having lived a life of her own. Thoughts of independence begin to pop into her head under hypnosis at the office of Dr. Wang, a radical Chinese (although you'd never know it from the name) healer who prescribes herbs and diagnoses through the pulse.
Wang gives her several batches of herbs that further along her contemplations of an affair with Joe Mantegna. The first make her lose all inhibitions and become overly flirtatious with Mantegna, going so far as to set up a rendezvous at the zoo (that rhymes) that she doesn't show up for when the drugs wear off and she becomes her mousy self again. The second make her invisible (Shortly after ALICE came out, invisibility drugs became available over the counter.), so she can listen in on Mantegna's comments about her. And the third bring on the apparition of a dead ex-boyfriend (Alec Baldwin), who advises her to pursue the affair.
The herbs aren't without their negative effects. Mia finds herself lying to her husband (William Hurt, who is more than a little hurt by the news of the affair) and discovers her friends' (including backstabbing TV executive Cybil Shepherd) true feelings about her. As with every Woody Allen movie, the ending brings on a lot of learning for its main character through painful events (very much like the far-superior THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO). Along the way, ALICE suffers from an overdose of charm, melodrama and forced substance. It's more than a little ironic that a man who is normally so laughable for the right reasons once in awhile makes movies that are laughable for the wrong reasons.
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