like i've said before, sometimes all i want to do is talk to you through things. sometimes paper bags or held-up newspapers, sometimes telephones, sometimes other pieces of culture. I did manage to get this one in print for next week though, so maybe the paper bag thing is the way to go...
Isn’t it such a great feeling when you are living on top of the world. You get to enjoy a sense of absolute belonging as play, people, and opportunities flow through your life. At least, they do if you are that perfectly hip GQ man that serves as a role model for so many. You know the type: that one person you know who has great clothes, finds himself at all the right places every night, and graces himself with many of the most exceedingly fine women the city has to offer. Desperately you want to be this man. Desperately you buy another beer and disgrace yourself quietly.
Alfie is one of these guys, a perfectly charming young man, British, and living in New York to the best of his abilities. His job at a bleakly on-the-verge limousine taxi company seems to provide Alfie with the income he needs to live in a shitty apartment so he can afford nice Gucci suits. If you’re quick you’ll quickly notice how brilliant a flirt this gentleman is, as a playful sense of wordplay and body language attracts nearly all of Manhattan to him. In fact, the film slyly points out Alfie’s fantastic charm as he tries to seduce the viewer through witty monologue after witty monologue. Maybe it’s best to think of Alfie as an attractive Woody Allen, cunningly willing the film’s audience to side with his audaciously neurotic personality.
It is the charm of Alfie which will make or break this film for most people, and is arguably the thematic focus of the movie as a whole. While his silver tongue and quick wit do indeed work for the most part, there is a sense of inconsequentiality to everything around him that truly shows Alfie for what he is. Despite wanting to ensure that the women in his life are made happy by his actions, he never seems to respond emotionally to the women around him. The one exception occurs the moment he discovers that one of his girlfriends is a fairly decent alcoholic and is immediately consumed by the need to break up with her. In this moment alone in the film, love is examined with a degree of maturity and insight, as Alfie realizes that he has conflated feral desire with moral responsibility.
Other sequences aren’t anywhere as effective. Alfie’s nightcap with Lonette, who had just exited a lengthy yet tumultuous relationship with one of Alfie’s best friends, teases with the issues of abortion and fidelity. Their scenes together are indeed touching, yet are almost entirely empty of any character or thematic analysis. This intellectual void is filled with an insincere sentimentalism – small emotions of little consequence are exchanged between the two. Similarly empty is Alfie’s response to Susan Sarandon’s character, an older lover who dominates him despite Alfie’s best attempts to use her for a quick “class jump”. Was it a sense of need for domination which drew Alfie to this woman, a sense of infantilisation which makes him feel disempowered and thus “in love”? Sadly, the film does not explore these areas in enough detail for the audience to care either. Writer/Director Charles Shyer never really gives any space to work out such themes.
Indeed, seen this way, it is difficult to accept that the film makers choose to examine the concept of the promiscuity which captivates Alfie’s identity. Token scenes depicting Alfie’s emotional crises dominate the last half-hour of the movie, and they serve to point to the emotional vacuum of the hour leading up to them. The biggest difference between Alfie as a lead and the aforementioned Woody Allen is that the latter understands that it is the flaws in his personality which invites the audience into his life as his luck gets worse. Alfie bemoans his position like a whiney prince who can’t have his way, and it is this ineffectual, boy-who-cried-wolf existentialism which cracks the plaster in this film. If Shyer wanted an homage to the screwball comedies of the 1940s – arguably the true inspiration for this remake of the 1966 version which starred Michael Caine – then he should have kept any seriousness as an undertone to be teased out by film buffs, and not as pivotal moments to forward the plot.
Despite this prominent flaw, it is the acting which redeems the film and will likely allow it to capture an audience. Superficiality does indeed have a place in the cinema, and as an advertisement for success-through-consumption, Alfie succeeds in spades. Jude Law is perfectly cast as the puppy-dog womanizer whose every glance can inspire envy or lust. Susan Sarandon, Marisa Tomei, and Sienna Miller gorgeously portray his three “major” affairs, with Miller’s self-destructive pleasure seeker serving as the best romantic foil to Alfie’s personality. Like Sex and the City, Alfie causes viewers to want to be the characters in the narrative, living, loving, and shopping as they do. In fact, the entire film comes across as an essay in lifestyle enhancement for the retro-analog set. Beautiful interiors are filled with sensuous yet minimally arranged furniture and decor. You can’t help but enthusiastically consume every prop in the film, and this fetish is extended into the very look of the film. Everything is about flow in Alfie: the flow of women and pleasure in Alfie’s life is mirrored by the elegantly fast pace of the film’s sequencing. Maybe we can tease out of the film this one theme: life goes quickly so grab and love what you can. Gorgeous people doing mundane things: many people will follow Alfie’s motto in the movie, and just go with the flow.
Please don't confuse the enthusiasm I have for the review for the enthusiasm I may have felt for the film itself, however...
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