Reel Talk: Alfie
By Audrey Rock
Transcript Bulletin Movie Critic


It is a rare occasion when, out of a mediocre film, an extraordinary performance emanates. (Director) Charles Shyer’s "Alfie," the movie, whines and stagnates and licks its wounds while moralizing on the most obvious of points.

Jude Law’s Alfie, the character, transgresses and converts and vacillates with density of feeling. His is one of the top performances of the past year, meted out with forceful agitation.

Law rescues this remake of the 1966 film (starring Michael Caine) with his fabulously entrancing update of the ultimate heartbreaker. He’s a New York City limo driver whose serial womanizing jeopardizes the fragile emotions of single moms, confused twentysomethings, insecure wives, and older women.

Filled with hearty zeal for all things shallow, the meticulously dressed Alfie fervently delights in bachelorhood. He’s convinced that it allows him the ultimate in worldly pleasures without responsibility or consequence. He aspires to nothing but excitement, entertainment and, perpetually selfish independence.

In hopping from one luscious woman to the next (played by Sienna Miller, Susan Sarandon, Marisa Tomei, Jane Krakowski, and Nia Long) Law creates a despicable persona. Alfie is an intelligently developed playboy--deceitful, sly, unapologetic, wickedly handsome, and hateful. An overtly toxic nighthawk who even the most reasonable and educated woman would still find smashingly irresistible.

Here is offered up a smorgasboard of great pretenders, including Sarandon as a hardened female philanderer. These are they who put on a nonchalant face for other pretenders. And together, they create the ultimate sociopath fantasy: a world full of pleasures and devoid of emotional responsibility.

The inevitable occurs, and a binding pile of messy consequence builds on Alfie’s doorstep, causing him to lose control of his controlled environment. A seamless, perfectly natural evolution of character takes place. Law delivers unflinching, unanswerable truth about such lifestyles.

The script written by Elaine Pope is cluttered with a confusing in-and-out parade of female characters and moral flip-flopping. A long mid-movie stretch of repetition quickly grows stale. However, the refreshing twist that takes Alfie someplace you’d never expect a Hollywood concoction to go, and it’s startling but firmly footed ending do justice to Law’s arresting performance.

Grade: B-