Available on Blu-Ray Mon 3 April 2017
If Donald Trump is a poor person’s idea of what a rich person is like, the characters in many Woody Allen films are an adolescent’s view of how adults behave. In Alice Mia Farrow plays a rich wife and mother who appears to have everything; dinner parties, rich husband (William Hurt), full-length mink, kids and a nanny, and a drop-dead Bauhaus/moderne Manhattan apartment. The ghastly yuppie fashions of scarlet suits with huge shoulder pads are as hilarious as anything in the script.
Alice has everything but she’s unhappy and is in search for some romance in her life. A visit to a herbalist gives her a new lease of life, and she finds herself flirting with a man at the kindergarten (Joe Mantegna) when they are both picking up their respective progeny. Against her Catholic background, and thanks to the Chinese potion, she initiates a passionate love affair.
Farrow owns the movie despite adopting the same intonations and mannerisms as Woody Allen. At the time the film was made, Farrow and Allen were married, their acrimonious, not to say scandalous, split lay way ahead. This is Alice in Wonderland complete with potions and doors and a world turned upside down. It’s Alice as seen in the looking glass of a chattering, self-absorbed metropolitan elite. But this is a soft target for satire and the humour is laid on with the proverbial trowel. There are some wonderful moments in the film, as when Alice hooks up with the ghost of a dead ex-boyfriend (a very young looking Alec Baldwin) and they go flying over the rooftops of New York like Peter Pan and Wendy. Or when she becomes invisible and is able to snoop on what other people are doing behind closed doors. And then a love potion gets added to the party punch bowl. But things don’t half drag.
Farrow is wonderfully watchable despite adopting Woody Allen’s irritating tics and neurotic observations. It’s all pleasant enough, but it’s such a shallow depiction of the uptown chattering classes. One, of course, to which Woody and Mia totally belong.