“Still
Alice” is a very difficult film to watch not because of the subject
matter but because Julianne Moore inhabits the persona of Alice so you
feel, and see, everything that is happening, and what will happen, to
this woman.
Alice Howland is a very successful
linguistic professor at Columbia University in New York who has written
books on language and traveled the world teaching it. She and her
equally successful husband, John (Alec Baldwin) live in a brownstone in
which they have raised their three children, now on their own paths, and
have a summer home on the shore. In everyway she is successful as a
professional, a mother and a wife.
Very early in
the film Alice, at the age of fifty, is diagnosed with early on set
Alzheimer’s which it turns out is genetic and there is a 50 percent
chance of their children contacting it and, after testing, one of the
children tests positive. The screenwriters/directors Richard Glatzer and
Wash Westmoreland dismiss this angle in the movie instead concentrating
on Alice and Moore comes through with a devastating performance. By the
end of the film you will know what it means to have Alzheimer’s, what
and how it takes everything from you. Wordlessly, with a look, the
changes in her face, the awareness of what she will lose before she
loses it, is upsetting because we know what she had and she no longer
does.
The film rightfully concentrates on Moore
but the screenwriters don’t help her in not filling out the roles of her
husband and children. We know her husband loves her because he tells
her but Baldwin is a good enough actor to show us with little touches
here and there. Her children, played by Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth
and Hunter Parrish, are normal, well adjusted children which at times
can drive a parent crazy and there is one scene where Moore uses that
old line, “….I can because I am your mother,” that has the audience
laughing. The conflict between a mother and daughter is briefly touched
on just as the sibling rivalry between sisters is but neither are
fleshed out.
The film is not all sadness and
tears, with little bits of humor here and there, but we share the few
triumphs Alice has along the way just as in two scenes we are afraid to
breathe.
For those who haven’t dealt with
Alzheimer’s in their family this is a learning experience of what has
happened with 45 million people in the world going through this
debilitating disease and what their loved ones have to deal with.
Julianne
Moore has deservedly earned 4 Oscar nominations along the way and with
her 5th in “Still Alice” she is deserving of getting that statue that
has eluded her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrXrZ5iiR0o