Still
Alice
Julianne
Moore stars as
Alice – a college professor at Columbia who is world renowned
in the field of linguistics. She and her husband, John (Alec Baldwin),
live the life of the East Coast, upper class well-to-do with a great
home in the city, plenty of money, a lawyer for a daughter (Kate
Bosworth), a doctor for a son (Hunter Parrish), and another daughter
who has the financial backing from Mom and Dad to be a struggling
actress, Lydia (Kristen Stewart), without struggling too much. Life is
good.
However, Alice has started to notice some memory problems, but not the
typical stuff you experience as you get older. Her physician has
determined our professor is experiencing early onset
Alzheimer’s. The revelation has shaken Alice and has the
entire family worried about what the future holds.
How will everyone cope with Alice’s decline?
How will Alice handle it?
Still Alice
connects with the audience because every person on some level worries
about being Alice or loving someone close to them who becomes Alice.
Along with Moore’s ability to portray the character, this
makes Still Alice
a striking, emotionally heartbreaking tale.
Moore is amazing and should be considered the frontrunner for Best
Actress at the Oscars. Because of her performance, there is not a human
being on the planet who can walk out of this movie without shedding one
tear somewhere along the way. Even Kim Jong-un would have to feel a bit
of sympathy.
Moore captures Alice’s fear of what is ahead even more than
the confusion she feels as the disease takes control. We see and feel
her pain of knowing everything she holds dear and near will slip away.
Even more, she touches us as we see the guilt of knowing this can be
passed on to her children and grandchildren.
Struggling with Alzheimer’s is not a physical battle like
what we see in a movie like The
Theory of
Everything,
so Moore has to capture our attention and hearts with the look in her
eyes or outward emotions displayed for all to see. Essentially, we are
watching the light in her eyes going out, the confusion at not grasping
the memories, knowledge and daily thoughts she normally had, or the
frustration of feeling the grip of the disease tightening around her.
Making it even more impactful, Moore excels at showing us how the
disease is affecting her relationships with family members, which is
heartbreaking and all too real.
Writers/directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (based on the
book by Lisa Genova) do a fantastic job capturing all of this emotion
on screen, but deserve the most credit for using the fear of the
unavoidable to impact the audience the most. While this might sound
crass, Westmoreland and Glatzer are using this fear almost like a
horror director uses the fear of what is around the corner to raise
tension in Still Alice.
Sadly, Stewart is the one actor in the film who brings it down a notch.
The young thespian is engaging in her typical uninterested, detached,
aloof attitude. I get that she was cast to bring some young people into
the theater, but she only adds to the ticket sales (maybe). Still
Alice deserves more than that.
Still
Alice is rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, and brief language
including a sexual reference.
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