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| © Focus Features |
On the surface, this is a straightforward rom-com: boy meets girl, they fall in love (or are at least headed in that direction), complications prevent the course of true love from running smooth, and there's a happy ending with the whole world being better off for it. On that level, it's a very good movie. It involves a certain amount of magic and questions that go much deeper than a rom-com, but gives no answers; not even opinions. It's like the movie is the Mike Myers character in a Saturday Night Live "Coffee Talk" skit, saying to the audience, "Talk amongst yourselves; I'll give you a topic: race in America."
Justice Smith plays Aren, a timid young yarn artist whose work is not much in vogue. He comes to the attention of Roger, played by David Alan Grier, the only cast member I'd heard of. Roger is a Magical Negro, a term used by Spike Lee to describe characters like Bagger Vance: black characters whose sole function is to help the white characters grow; except that in Kobi Libii's movie (which he wrote as well as directed), they are actually magical. As Roger tells Aren at one point, "I'm basically a wizard."
Roger sponsors Aren for membership in the magic society, and Aren quickly becomes one of them. As Roger explains the group's purpose, "When white people are comfortable, more of us survive." Aren's first assignment is some techie bro named Jason (Drew Tarver) who fancies himself a high flyer computer whiz, despite being cinematically blinkered and, frankly, self-centered to the point of being kind of stupid in a real-world way.
Aren immediately gains Jason's trust and Jason adopts him as his pet social guru. Aren also meets Lizzie (An-Li Bogan) and finds himself smitten with her. A problem arises because Jason decides to be interested in Lizzie (as he is unable to read social signals, and thinks she's into him -- she's not, really -- and Jason doesn't notice his "friend" Aren's interest in Lizzie), which complicates Aren's job as a Magical Negro.
The love story is well done, though the conversation in this film is so woke as to be distracting to old folks like me. (I know people in the big cities actually talk this way these days; they've seen it on TV since the turn of the century and I guess they think it's normal; it's not, it's just fashion.) The question of race is always there, just under the surface, and it makes me wonder if all or almost all black people in America really live their normal day-to-day lives in a tense survival mode, or if that's just a plot-device of the movie. I don't have an answer either.
Every female of my acquaintance, I believe, is familiar with the 1908 story of the little orphan girl who accidentally becomes a member of the Cuthbert family. It ranks right up there with Little Women as the literary classic for girls. No male, that I know of, knows much about the story.
I knew nothing at all about the story, except the name, until I went to Prince Edward Island in 2013. PEI is a pleasant place, but the people there were all obsessed with Anne of Green Gables. When ever I got into conversation with anyone in Charlottetown, they insisted on telling me where every place associated with the book is located, how to get there, and what its relationship to the story is.* It's like, if I meet somebody from out of town, and I tell them not only where the Alamo is, but everything I know about its history and the people involved in the battle, the building's decline, its saving and restoration, and the current controversies associated with its maintenance.
Okay, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but just a little. Anyway, when I saw this DVD on the library shelf, I included it in the Havasu Film Festival just because I was curious what all the fuss was about. Now I know.
People see a doormat, they're going to walk on it. Alfie is a 30-something Cockney in 1960s London, and he sees doormats all over the city, and they all seem to say "welcome."
It's not possible for me to separate this film from the era is was made in, when the Swinging 60s was well under way, nor from the milieu of Britain's class-based society, which, to an American, is one of the most foreign things about the United Kingdom. We think we understand it, but we don't. I suspect there's some aspect to it that, in the British mind -- at least the British mind of the post-war era, when the late end of rationing and deprivation slid into the strange, upbeat and rapid change of the mid-1960s -- somehow excuses the kind of behaviour we see reflected in this film.
Alfie is generally considered a particularly good and important film. It certainly made Michael Caine a major film star, and the movie did very well "all over the globe, except in France, because the French couldn't believe an Englishman could make it with ten women."* I had never seen it, so I included it in this week's DVD haul from the library.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the general acclaim for this movie has more to do with its artistic departure from established film practice and its somewhat sympathetic depiction of the British working class, and less to do with Alfie's growth as a man. That growth may well be ephemeral: saying you're more mature doesn't actually make you more mature, but the film ends before we can see if there's any actual change in his attitudes and practices. Artistically, that's fine: it lets us as viewers debate what came after the closing credits. Skeptics like me will want to believe Alfie grew up and will go on to a life of stability and contentment with someone who is also stable and contented; but we will think it more likely that he woke up the following day, kicked himself and asked What was I thinking? And he will go looking for another doormat.
Amazing! The end of Week Two. Look for the first post from Week Three, coming soon.
