Still Alice (2014)
PG-133.5 Stars out of 5
Writer/Directors Richard
Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland
Writing Lisa
Genova (novel’s author)
Cinematography Denis
Lenoir
Julianne Moore Alice Howland
Alec Baldwin John Howland
Kate Bosworth Anna Howland-Jones
Hunter Parrish Tom HowlandKristen Stewart Lydia Howland
Moore plays Columbia linguistics professor Alice Howland. We join her in the opening sequences of the movie as she celebrates her fiftieth birthday with husband John (Alex Baldwin), eldest daughter Anna (Kate Bosworth), middle child Tom (Hunter Parrish), and late to the party and movie cliché difficult child Lydia (Kristen Stewart). All the Howlands are clearly very intelligent and with the exception of misfit Lydia well accomplished in their respective fields. We quickly learn the family dynamics as lawyer and married Anna asserts her evident disapproval of her younger, unmarried and aspiring actress sister Lydia. Both men and largely Alice too check out of the ongoing feud between the two sisters, though throughout the movie, Alice makes her disapproval of Lydia’s career choice abundantly clear.
The movie proceeds at a stately pace in the beginning showing several obvious and a few less obvious examples of Alice’s progressing disease: she forgets dates and names, even that she was introduced to Tom’s new girlfriend, gets lost running on the Columbia campus, and on at least one occasion flies into a rage when John fails to properly respond to Alice’s expression of her fears as regards her condition. That something is wrong is evident to Alice and she begins to be tested by a neurologist. His preliminary diagnosis of Alzheimer ’s disease is rejected by medical researcher John, and we begin to see in Alice’s fury both the early signs of Alzheimer’s effect on the patient’s emotional control, but also of Moore’s exquisite ability to convey both the subtle signs of Alzheimer’s and also the more flagrant ones as well. As Alice’s condition begins to accelerate and the signs and symptoms become more and more obvious to Alice and those around her, the sense of desperation that Moore is able to convey with her eyes alone is breathtaking. While it is all to true that the Best Actor/Actress Oscars award often goes to actors portraying someone suffering from something, in this case, Moore’s win for Best Actress in 2015 is one of those cases where it really was an earned award. The movie also does a reasonably good job of showing how each of the family members around Alice react to her disease; that the misfit is the one to take the most care of Alice should come as no surprise. Though, I will admit that I found Kristen Stewart’s portrayal of the misfit child to be surprisingly effective. (The Twilight movies apparently did not have a permanent effect on her.)
Alice and John learn from her doctor that her type of Alzheimer’s disease is a familial version, one likely inherited from her father and most likely passed to one or more of her children. An ensuing telephone discussion with the child that has indeed inherited the gene that gives the disease is one of the most painful scenes in the movie. The look that passes over Alice’s face as she is forced to confront not only her own desperate situation, but that she also now believes that she is “responsible” for giving it to her offspring is a heartbreaking moment. The movie then engages in something that I struggle to believe could have occurred: Alice is asked to give a speech to an Alzheimer’s meeting. Is this a meeting for the lay or the researchers working on the problem? It is far from clear. Alice’s speech is incredibly moving and erudite; it is hard to believe someone who must underline each line of the speech as she gives it to help her remember that she has already spoken that line, could have written the speech that Alice gives. It is a beautiful speech, and in many ways, the highlight for me in the movie. I am bothered by what feels too much like Hollywood writing in the construction and delivery of the speech.
Indeed, the writing in this movie is often a problem for me. Consider the intended but far from subtle irony of a linguistics professor getting Alzheimer’s disease. Someone, whose complete academic career has been spent using and understanding words, but now must watch those words (watch to some degree) slip irretrievably away, never to be regained. Another irony in the writing and one I actually found far more intriguing is the concept that the more intelligent the Alzheimer’s patient is, the more rapid the decline the effects of Alzheimer’s can seem to be to the patient. The movie offers up a fascinating idea and develops it nicely with the Alice character: intelligent sufferers of this disease start to create clever behaviors to compensate for the disease’s effects. They fool themselves and those around them into believing there is no problem. Alice for example creates clues for herself with her iPhone and gives herself memory tests as she cooks. She knows there is a problem but suffers as many do with serious problems with both the disease and a case of denial; or maybe its hope, hope that they will be the one to outsmart whatever the disease that afflicts them. Thus, the intelligent may be able to ignore the disease longer than the less gifted, and as a result once it hits, it seems to hit faster; when in truth it is just further along than might be otherwise thought.
The directing and cinematography were often used to great effect. In a movie where the protagonist is slowly losing their identity as they lose their memories, and in a movie where those effects are so well portrayed in the face of Julianne Moore, the director’s decision to provide a series of framing shots where Alice’s face takes up 2/3’s of the screen while the background often fades out of focus was I thought a brilliant technique. They use it as well when Alice gets lost after jogging on campus. She comes to a stop and looks around herself. The sounds of those around her continue on, almost as a distraction, but in the meanwhile the buildings and quads that she has walked for years are now out of focus to the viewer and presumably in some sense to her as well. It is a clever technique to show the disorientation and confusion likely felt by the early stage Alzheimer’s patient.
As I note above, the speech by Alice is both a high point and low point in the movie for me. If I just drop the unlikelihood of the speech and just focus on the speech, there is so much to marvel at in that speech. What it boils down to for me is the question, who are we but our memories? Each of us can recall to some degree many life events in our lives, both good and bad. If we think about ourselves and ponder how we came to be whoever each of us has come to be, what would be left as our memories are slowly seeping away? We would forget events in our lives, how to drive or write, the names, the faces of our loved ones; maybe any sense of who we are, including perhaps our own name. Think about what defines a human from the other animals on our planet. Think about how we frame almost all of our thoughts about anything based on what we’ve learned earlier in our life; our politics, our abilities, our passions. Strip those away and what is left? The move suggests love at the very ending of the film, and that’s fine from an artistic point of view, but is it really left, once our memories have fled? Is there any more painful disease afflicting humankind than any of the various forms of senility? Alice herself wishes for cancer rather than Alzheimer’s; it is hard to argue the point.
This is a good movie about Alzheimer’s. I recommend it primarily for Julianne Moore’s performance and for the speech scene. However, I much more strongly urge you to see Amour (2012). It is a similar topic, but a much better movie; the acting is superb, the directing and writing unsurpassed. And it’s kind of nice to see such veterans of the screen as Jean-Louis Trentignant and Emmanuelle Riva acting so remarkably well in their mid-eighties. Despite the subject material, it gives one hope for the one’s own future.
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