On Demand Weekly

On Demand Weekly provides new movie reviews of hot movies on demand from the POV of watching from the comfort of your home. Today’s review: DEAR ALICE (Eurocinema).

DEAR ALICE
A universal story reminds us that life is just about six degrees of separation….
By Cynthia Kane

What might attract most U.S. audiences to DEAR ALICE is that Danny Glover plays one of the principal roles in this ensemble cast. What I love about his performance is that he once again proves himself a formidable actor and that the egoistic hand of Hollywood stardom has never blemished him as an artist.

Why is he acting in a Swedish film, one might ask? Why not? Swedish director Othman Karim does come with some clout. His 2005 OH, SARA won top awards at the Moscow International Film Festival and introduced Alexander Skarsgård (HBO’s TRUE BLOOD) to the world.

The story takes place one ordinary day in Stockholm where four persons’ lives - four persons struggling with major, but to others seemingly trivial, issues - invariably mesh, collide circumstantially and change each other’s life paths forever.

A Gambian immigrant, Franzis Namazi (Danny Glover) trying to bring his family to live with him in Sweden struggles with the right to stay and with economic breakdown, unable to keep his little shop selling African tchotchkes and art afloat; a former television star, Bosse (Ulf Brunnberg) is suddenly replaced by a younger, ethnically diverse star at Swedish Television, only to find his beloved wife is deceiving him with a younger version of himself; a husband and father, Moses Said (Peter Gardiner) who himself is a first generation African-Swede attempts to deal with his wife’s ascendency in the corporate legal world, while attempting to send money to his hospitalized father in a village in Uganda – the transaction held up by the international forces considering that anyone with the name of Moses Said must be sending money to fund terrorist activities; his blonde Swedish wife, Karin Carlsson-Said (Tuva Novotny) faces her first day as a corporate law partner, only to discover her new partners insist she drop her Muslim husband’s surname; the final connecting element that bonds them forever is a narcissistic and troubled actor, Hakan (Stefan Sauk, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO) ignores the warnings of his lawyer, Karin, and sets off on an alcoholic rampage.