Toronto International Film Festival 2023: ALICE & JACK Is An Embarrassment For The Talent Level Of Its Director And Cast

I appreciated the ending of Juho Kuosmanen’s Alice & Jack. It was an ending that felt a little predetermined yes, but it allowed for his central characters to finally breath. It was shot in an open grassy field near a kite festival and it involved a confession by Alice of something that was a recurring thread through the story that tied to her behavior. It was cathartic, it felt natural in its conclusion and it still held a sense of wonder beyond. It had a finality but also a cosmic sense of possibility in the infinite. It was an ending and not an ending. It’s what made Kuosmanen’s film Compartment No. 6, his best in my opinion, such a rich and rewarding dive into the honest hearts of people, which is his strength. Unfortunately, every single second that came before that ending in Alice & Jack was terrible.

Ill-Conceived from The First Minute

Kuosmanen is a filmmaker whose characters are consumed by love and a need for companionship in different ways. Alice & Jack, a TV series being marketed for production by Film 4, is his first project from outside of Finland and it is comprised of no subtext or ambiguity. Jack narrates that he believes “love is the only thing we have”. That pretty much explains Kuosmanen’s whole deal, but in Alice & Jack it’s played to such a tawdry and milked degree that it loses any sense of wonder or emotion or even whimsy that he was able to conjure up in his previous two films The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki (2017) and Compartment No. 6 (2020).

Perhaps it’s a situation of lost in translation mainly because this “movie” is a giant commercial for the show, perhaps it’s a conscious effort to play to a non-Finnish audience who may not understand certain dryness in love and compassion. I think the whole thing was just ill-conceived.

The Director and Cast Deserve Better Projects

Jack (Domnhall Gleeson, who keeps getting cast in movies below his talent level) and Alice (Andrea Riseborough, ditto) meet at a bar and Alice begins a rapid-fire interrogation of Jack’s job as a medical researcher. The dialogue goes so fast, the banter is like if you put Aaron Sorkin’s firecracker dialogue on fast-forward and twisted it in knots. It was painful to listen to but given the fact that Alice is a troubled character and it was a first-meet, I thought maybe it could be a deliberate character quirk. But no, Kuosmanen has his entire cast reciting cyclical and exhausting diatribes throughout. Jack’s closes best friend and coworker in the lab, Anil, acts as a “best friend of the main character who gives frank and sardonic advice” and it’s painful to listen to.

They talk to each other like they’re reading lines that are on paper that’s taped to each other’s shirts. There’s so many contradictions in actions – like Jack purposefully lying to his eventual wife about the fact that he still thinks about Alice when she’s pregnant but then coming clean and acting mopey that he has finally been honest. This can be mistaken as ‘complex character dynamic’ but to me it’s just bad writing. It’s writing that tries to work its way through complexity by being verbose.

Conclusion:

It also literally just explains every single thing the characters are thinking. Jack and Alice’s conversations are pure confessionals and yet, the movie has to hold the one truly horrible detail of Alice’s past hidden for the cathartic ending. It’s an ending I respect but it doesn’t work in the context of the greater movie. Maybe in the TV show it will fit better, but if the show is going to be as cloyingly sentimental as this movie was, then I think I’ll just leave it a mystery.

Watch Alice & Jack