Still Alice
3.5 Waffles!

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.