Still Alice
Director: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland
Starring: Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth
Four stars
When we refer to an actor’s performance as breathtaking, we’re usually engaging in hyperbole. Rarely, if ever, do we mean it actually affected our ability to breathe.
But during Still Alice, watching the vital, sharply intelligent woman played by Julianne Moore slowly lose her mental faculties — and, most painfully, her identity — to Alzheimer's disease, I found myself frequently needing to gulp in big breaths of air, merely to steel myself for the next scene.
It’s no surprise, then, that Moore was rewarded for her outstanding performance with the Best Actress Oscar last month.
Of course, the power of her performance is in no small part due to the nature of the material. There’s no way to tell a story about Alzheimer’s that isn’t ultimately devastating, and the writer-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland clearly had no intention of sugar-coating the cruelty of this disease.
As its title suggests, Still Alice, based on the novel by neuroscientist Lisa Genova, is about one woman — and thankfully we have Moore, one of our most sensitive and nuanced actresses, in the role. She gives a warm, brave and shattering performance.
We first meet Alice, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, as she is celebrating her 50th birthday with family. Chic and accomplished, she’s managed to work and travel and raise three kids in a beautiful home with her husband, John (Alec Baldwin), also an academic.
But one day, during a lecture, Alice stops, mid-sentence. She can’t remember a key word. She recovers quickly with a joke. Back home, taking her usual jog, she gets lost. The camera blurs, along with the connections in her brain. We shudder. We know what’s coming.
Time passes — too quickly, of course. Alice tries to keep working, but that proves unrealistic. Also unrealistic: that loved ones, in such circumstances, would behave like saints. Of course they don’t. Alice’s younger daughter Lydia (an excellent Kristen Stewart) is going through a self-indulgent phase and struggles to make room for her mother’s affliction.
And John, subtly portrayed by Baldwin, has trouble balancing his devotion to his wife with fears for the future — and his career goals.
But though these relationships are key, the movie distinguishes itself from others about Alzheimer’s by being, essentially, about Alice’s relationship with Alice. It’s about her fight to retain what she can of herself — to remain the person she knows.
A bitter twist is that Alice is a linguistics professor — an expert in communicating. As her abilities fade, she agrees nonetheless to address a medical conference. She gets up there, a shadow of the confident teacher she once was, and this scene is one of the film’s most powerful.
There’s a behind-the-scenes element to the film that makes it all the more poignant. In 2011, the co-director Glatzer saw a doctor about slurred speech and discovered he was suffering from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He directed the movie using a speech-to-text app on his iPad.
Whereas Alzheimer's attacks the mind and ALS the body, both attack one's sense of identity. As the directors express so well in Still Alice, with the help of Moore's incredible performance, holding onto that identity is what keeps us alive and vital and connected to the world.
artslife@thenational.ae
