Alice and the Mayor

A lively, funny and touching exploration of the way we live now through the filter of two generations.

Alice and the Mayor isn’t bad, per se; it’s just routine. Not radical enough to be the political call to action that it so desperately wants to be, and not fully developed enough to the character study that it eventually reverts back to, it’s a strange hybrid of a film, with the two disparate sections never really working in conjunction.

A movie so enamored by its self-perception of cleverness that even policy wonks will find it hard to muster enthusiasm.

While the rapport between the middle-aged Paul and the thirtyish Alice is a fascinating give-and-take — they are essentially equals because one’s lack of experience is compensated for by the other’s lack of ideas — there is no real room for either to grow or be transformed. Their relationship, while full of exchanges, is finally quite stagnant.