The film is an adaptation of Arlo Guthrie’s 1968 song “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” a perennial classic that is as synonymous with Thanksgiving as balloons floating down 6th Avenue. If you’ve spent enough time in the Berkshires, you already know the beats of the story by heart:
Arlo went to a Thanksgiving dinner at Alice and Ray Brock’s house (a converted church that is now the Guthrie Center). Arlo offered to clean up afterward and dumped some trash where he shouldn’t have. Arlo pled guilty and, as a result, was later deemed too immoral to fight in Vietnam.
The beauty of Arthur Penn’s movie is that it opens up this story and illustrates the complicated human context that surrounds it. The wry humor of Guthrie’s lyrics still shines through, but Penn fills out the movie with equal amounts of grief and exuberance.
The (highly fictionalized) Ray and Alice of the movie are trying to build a haven for their friends where they can be themselves without persecution. It is an idea that was at the core of the counterculture movement of the late 1960s: As the world fell deeper and deeper into turmoil, there was a chance to start over, to do things right and create a society centered on love and openness.
While there are a variety of reasons why this didn’t work (the Nixon administration, for one), “Alice’s Restaurant” points a finger squarely at the people trying to start the revolution in the first place. The film paints Ray Brock as a tempestuous father figure, playing pied piper to a collection of wayward souls. Things fall apart as Ray’s jealousy, anger, and resentment seep through, allowing disillusionment to take hold.
It is a sobering depiction of the end of a movement, and the quiet tragedy imbued in Penn’s final shot still resonates today: It doesn’t matter how righteous your cause is if the people who embody it can’t get out of their own way.
“Alice’s Restaurant” plays April 27 as part of our “Berkshires at the Counterculture” series. The screening will be followed by a talkback with Arlo Guthrie and Matt Penn.
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