Anna Kendrick: "Alice, Darling"

Alice is thirty years old, and she's in a bad relationship.

This guy, Simon, watches what she eats and attacks her if the snacking becomes "excessive." He ridicules her ideas in public. He tries to isolate her by suggesting that she does not need her friends. When a work obligation comes up, Simon says, "I thought you were going to reach higher than that job."

Additionally, Simon doesn't observe boundaries; he invades a "retreat weekend," and he sends endless text messages, asking for erotic selfies. Finally, Simon insists on sex when it's clear that his girlfriend is anxious or uninterested, or both; I have not seen so much bad sex on-screen since the end of Lena Dunham's "Girls."

If Simon is a mess, it's also really difficult to spend time with Alice. She loathes herself; she believes that she is "bad." She pulls little clumps of hair from her head; she twists hair around her finger until her skin turns purple. When Alice wants to see her friends, she invents an elaborate lie; we watch her practicing the lie before Simon returns. Little events--the momentary loss of a cell phone, a brief "meeting-a-stranger" fantasy--cause Alice to lose her cool. The disappearance of a neighboring young woman becomes a source of morbid fascination for Alice; it's evident that Alice is seeing one version of her own future in the many news stories she watches.

I've read an odd response to Anna Kendrick's work in this film. One critic says Kendrick has departed from her "standard bubbly persona"--but it's not clear to me that "bubbly" is often the right word for Kendrick. She isn't even bubbly in "Pitch Perfect," one of her lighter movies. "Cake," "50/50," "The Last Five Years," "The Accountant," "Into the Woods," "Up in the Air," "Happy Christmas," "Drinking Buddies"--these are not movies that say "bubbly" to me.

I don't see "Alice, Darling" as a departure for Kendrick; I see it as an extension of a certain kind of work that she has been doing for years and years. And this is a classic case of an actor being better than her material; the writing has a TV-special flavor, but Kendrick makes things exciting by being unpredictable. When Simon accosts Alice for not being responsive enough, Alice becomes jarringly angry: "I was at dinner!" Kendrick's strange, desperate loudness in this moment seems true to life. When Alice becomes annoyed with her well-intentioned friend, she, Alice, makes a cutting remark about her friend's joblessness. The savage tone Kendrick uses--and the sudden shift in her eyes--this is like lightning in a bottle.

Watching "Alice, Darling," I thought of a better film about domestic abuse, "Invisible Man." Both movies show how a man can persuade a woman that she is weak or even insane; this is gaslighting. But "Invisible Man" invents a memorable metaphor for the omnipresent, toxic man; the particular "invisibility suit" in this script was something that filmgoers had never seen before. "Alice, Darling," has nothing to compete with that twist; at times, it feels like the filmmaker, Nighy, had a checklist of symptoms to present, and she just worked through the list until she reached the end.

I do think "Alice, Darling" is a useful movie in the wake of Gabby Petito's death. Interviewed by cops, Petito seemed terrified and trapped; her eyes and tone did work that her actual words couldn't do. The cops misread several signs--decided that Petito was simply involved in a "spat"--and then sent Petito to her death.

I sense that this kind of story was on Kendrick's mind when she went to work on "Alice, Darling."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D2ZRfqKUD4

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