Alice (Emily Grace, in her first feature film role) has run away from her small town, New Hampshire home and hit the road, completely unprepared for the future. She has a wad of ill-gotten cash and a semblance of a plan. She's going to Florida, where she'll crash with a friend who goes to college there. Dolphins have always fascinated her, and eventually she hopes she'll somehow find a way to enroll herself in school and study marine biology. After an unpleasant encounter with a couple of
lowlifes on the highway, she pulls into a rest stop. As she's getting ready to hit the road again, Sandra (Judith Ivey) approaches her, warning Alice that she and her husband, Bill (Bill Raymond) saw some guy messing with her car. Sure enough, one of Alice's tires has been punctured. Worried that someone may be planning to ambush Alice out on the roadside, Bill (who, Alice notices, carries a gun) and Sandra ask Alice to follow them in case her car breaks down before she can get it fixed. Sure enough, the old wreck of a car does break down. Sandra and Bill offer to take the wary Alice to a bus station. She hops into their RV, and soon finds herself hitting it off with the loquacious Sandra and her quiet husband. When they offer to save her a few bucks by driving her all the way to Florida, she hesitantly accepts. Soon, they're treating her to meals, and buying her new outfits. But she soon learns the unsavory truth about how Sandra and Bill pay for their freewheeling lifestyle. What Alice Found, written and directed by A. Dean Bell, was shown at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival. ~ Josh Ralske, Rovi
Ivey is fascinating, cooing nonstop in a cozy Southern accent, friendly and accepting, but also observant and oddly unknowable. It's a performance that even gets better on second viewing.
What we found is a bleak, but interesting look into a world where the line is blurred between good people and bad. Judith Ivey's performance is the real jewel of the film.
Ivey delivers a sassy, no-nonsense performance and Grace shows herself a sensitive young actress, but neither overcomes Bell's pretensions or digital-video limitations.
What a nice surprise! I had my doubts that a low budget film about a lot lizard would be good, but I found this is an interesting movie. Good acting, and a good setting, made all the more real by the low budget filming. It is not slick, or insulting. Just a very nice character study. Very decent little Indie flick.
A gritty tale of a young woman who makes a series of bad choices and discovers that what she was running from wasn't as bad as she thought. The story is a bit predictable, the accents are phony, and the cinematography is low-budget all the way, but there is some gold here anyway. The characters are well drawn and the
interaction amongst the husband (Bill Raymond) and wife (Emily Grace) truck stop team and the young girl (Judith Ivey) they befriend is actually somewhat nuanced. The lure of easy money proves capable of breaking down Alice's resistance and provides the means by which she eventually grows up. Not a deep, psychological study, just an entertaining, small, unpolished gem.
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