Slavery, sadly, is something that is still with us today.  In a Christian sense, it is defined as allowing ourselves to be beholden to the temptations of society instead of giving ourselves over to the freedom found only in God.  That is a more esoteric way of looking at what has been referred to as the “peculiar institution.”  What is more peculiar is that the institution still exists today in some parts of the world.  If examples you need, look no further than what Jeffrey Epstein did.  We cannot allow ourselves to forget this fact, or the indelible stain human bondage has left upon us.  This is what makes today’s film, Alice (2022), an important one.  Hopefully this synopsis will convince you of this fact.

The first scene is of Alice (Keke Palmer) running through the woods, but that is technically getting ahead of ourselves.  Then again, if you were enslaved on a Georgia sugarcane plantation, you would be wanting to run away, too.  Instead, we see her and Joseph (Gaius Charles) being wedded until “distance” do they part.  Apparently, that distance is made almost insurmountable when their owner, Paul Bennett (Jonny Lee Miller), moves her into the main house.  Further, Paul plans to use Joseph to breed with other slaves in the area.  As for Joseph, he is told a story by Moses (Kenneth Farmer), about a person like them that fell from the sky one day.  The stranger’s belongings had been buried in the yard where Joseph finds them, uncovering a lighter, something they had never seen.  Between that and the books in the big house, Alice and Joseph are convinced that there is a bigger world.  As such, they vow to make a plan to escape to it.  Unfortunately, Joseph dies in the attempt before Alice can join him.  So distraught is she that she attacks Paul over dinner, though her outburst is provoked.  She spends an evening into the morning chained up in the front yard before Paul releases her, talking of how God’s greatest gift to man is forgiveness.  It is part of the insidious way in which Faith is used to maintain control over those held in bondage.  Alice, though, is not interest in forgiveness, instead smashing the glass of water she is handed into his face before running away.  She makes it without being followed, ending up on a highway where she is almost run over by a semi-truck.  This is when we get the major twist in the film: it is not the nineteenth century, but 1973.  She passes out before she is hit and awakens being driven down the road by Frank (Common), the driver of the truck, who takes her to a hospital.  What becomes apparent is that she assumes that all the other African Americans she encounters are enslaved.  Because she is unable to provide any substantive information to the nurse, they put her down as needing a seventy-two-hour psychological evaluation.  Frank notices the van for the sanitorium while walking back to the truck and decides he cannot let Alice go to that place.  Instead, he brings her home where he introduces her to a few modern conveniences.  The one that fascinates her the most is the television.  Upon turning it on, she sees a number of African American entertainers on different programs.  In the morning, while Frank goes to work, she looks through his things and discovers that he had been involved with the civil rights movement.  She also learns a bit about African American History, namely about the emancipation of slavery.  This is followed by the struggle by African Americans to fully realize their rights as citizens.  Next, she goes through the phone book to find Rachel Bennett (Alicia Witt), Paul’s wife, wanting to meet the women that used to “own” her.  When Frank gets home, he wants to know about Alice, who insists on the fact that she was a slave.  He has trouble believing her, but it is helped when she says she is going to meet someone she used to know, Rachel.  Their conversation does not go well, with Rachel claiming that what she did was for Alice’s own good.  Alice does not take this assertion kindly, with the meeting ending in her slapping Rachel.  As Rachel speeds away, Alice vows to Frank that she is going to retrieve all those still held by the Bennetts.  After getting some inspiration from watching Coffy (1973), she wants Frank to come with her to free her friends.  They do some planning together, but initially Frank declines to participate.  However, after receiving some flak from his brother and boss, they go together to start the process of exposing the Bennett’s sins.  It starts by setting off a forest fire that quickly spreads to the farm.  Pulling the truck up in front of the house, Alice goes inside to confront Paul.  He tries to claim that he had never prevented anyone from leaving, but she shoots him in the leg, leaving him to be found by the police.  In the aftermath, Joseph limps out from the flames and is reunited with Alice.  The film ends with an African American firefighter asking who she is.

She is Alice.  It is remarkable to see her go from oppressed to standing up to her oppressors.  This is especially true in light of the first part of the film that underscores the casual cruelty of slavery.  Alice and the others are treated like animals instead of people, which is difficult to watch.  What is also hard to see for Christians is the way in which Christianity is used to justify this treatment.  Is slavery in the Bible?  Yes.  Does God want one person to own another? No.  It is pretty simple.  Instead, God wants us to approach our fellow people, no matter their color, with compassion and kindness.  This is what Frank does for Alice.  Though he initially takes her for simply suffering from amnesia, he continues to help her in any way he can.  At the same time, what does it mean to “help” somebody?  The civil rights movement was that on a large scale.  Christianity is about the same thing.  Further, there were plenty of Christians, including Catholics, involved in the civil rights movement.  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was a protestant minister who often quoted Scripture, and there were many marches he led that were joined in by Catholic priests.  What you see later in the film in the more radical aspect of the movement, the more militant one.  I prefer a peaceful way of doing things, but one can understand the desire to resort to such measures when you feel so powerless.  I cannot pretend to know what it is like to feel such cruelty, and I would not be so bold as to tell people how they should react.  All I can do is pray for a better world, and that we all work together for one.

I also pray that you get a chance to see Alice.  It is a powerful film, especially when you consider the scene when she learns that her people had been free for over 100 years.  I teared up in that moment.  We need more than tears, though, to continue to work against taking society back to those crueler times, as some seem to hope to do.