Inspired by true events, Alice (Keke Palmer) is a Black woman who escapes slavery – in 1973? alice kekepalmer common blaxploitation nowplaying
What would you do if you found out that freedom was closer than you thought? Or simply a state of mind. Alice, the brainchild of debut director Krystin Ver Linden, is a revenge thriller set in the Antebellum South on a remote Georgia plantation. The film stars Emmy award winner KeKe Palmer as its eponymous heroine longing for her freedom and rapper-actor Common as the disillusioned political activist suffering from arrested development from losing his mother to the movement.
She then quickly resumes her running, and tumbles onto a busy freeway–something she had never seen before in her life. For me, this is when the sequencing feels slightly off. Not only was it disorienting to see her run out into the bright open street, but it was also baffling to think that freedom had been just footsteps away the entire time. We also just spent a third of the film entrenched in stagnant plantation life that, in actuality, was in the twentieth century and not the 1800s.
Palmer has the gift of vulnerability. It was easy to believe that she was taking in everything for the first time, especially while watching Pam Grier kick butt and take names in the Blaxploitation flick Coffy. To help set the tone, and jog Alice’s memory, Frank's apartment was filled with Black culture references. From Diana Ross's iconic Rolling Stone cover, Angela Davis speaking on television, and piles of books and Ebony Magazines.
I loved every minute of her badass moments, as well as her encouraging words to Frank. There’s a moment where Alice asks him to go back to the plantation with her and fight and we discover that his masculinity has been eroded right along with his confidence, due to being a Black man in America. This is one of Common’s most vulnerable scenes and he shows an adept range of emotions.