WhatzUp

Alfie
by Derek Neff

Like most American men, apparently, I wear too much cologne. Or at least that’s what transplanted Brit Alfie (Jude Law) thinks. Toward the beginning of the movie named after him, Alfie demonstrates for our benefit just how cologne should be applied: nothing above the shoulders, just a drop or two on either side of the upper chest, then (he explains suggestively) a few drops a little lower down. (“You never know where the evening may take you,” he says with a wink.)

The movie’s gambit of having Alfie talk directly into the camera for minutes on end - like a twenty-something, metrosexual version of Ferris Bueller - might easily have failed, but, alas, it works. The movie’s opening scenes are all saved from a tedious over-familiarity exactly because Alfie himself is the tour-guide taking us through one of his typical days. Like the women around him, we the audience are charmed, schmoozed, flattered and, yes, seduced, too. Alfie is, after all, a seducer par excellence. He’s a cad, and he knows it. (In one scene, after he’s seduced a woman in the back of a limo - he’s a chauffeur - he leans down and embraces the woman tenderly, then looks up and says ruefully into the camera, “Obligatory cuddling. One thousand one, one thousand two.”)

A man who lives the kind of life that Alfie lives deserves a comeuppance, of course, but I was almost sorry that the movie had to take us there so soon. I was having so much more fun with the shamelessly unscrupulous rake. It’s seldom in movies that we get to see a good anti-hero in action.

Of course, the movie wouldn’t have much narrative arc if Alfie didn’t see the light, would it? So, after Alfie’s sort-of-girlfriend Julie (Marisa Tomei) dumps him upon finding evidence of his infidelity in her trash can, and after he impregnates his best friend’s girlfriend (Nia Long), and after a doctor finds a worrying “growth” on the portion of Alfie’s anatomy that Alfie prizes most highly in this world, Alfie figures it’s time to change his ways.

We’re right there with Alfie, pulling for him, even if he does become a tad less engaging once he undertakes his earnest pursuit of real emotional commitment and (sigh) maturity. (Besides, he stops talking directly to us so much, and starts reaching out to the other people in his life more.) Director Charles Shyer, remaking the 1966 movie starring Michael Caine, has done such a good job of fleshing out the character of Alfie that by the end of the movie we can applaud Shyer for not resorting to easy solutions to Alfie’s troubles at the same time that we’re almost resentful of the way that the plot demands he be knocked down a few pegs lower than perhaps even he deserves.