Still Alice (2014)

I found the premise intriguing, and it's something I'm surprised hasn't been tackled so often on the big screen. Alzheimer's is an incredibly tragic disease that even to this day is poorly understood, and it seems an obvious go-to to base a story around. The thought of losing memories and cognitive abilities is one that terrifies me and many others, and is undoubtedly an incredible struggle to those who suffer from it.This is kind of a hard film to watch as it goes on as the titular Alice goes through the degenerative effects of her unfortunate condition. I personally don't have much experience in dealing with people with Alzheimer's or Dementia, but from what little experience I do have I felt Julianne Moore's performance encapsulates what this disease does to those affected and those close to them. As the film goes on, she gets less mentally stable, more disoriented, more forgetful, and more depressed as her condition gets worse, and this is even juxtaposed as she leaves a video memo for herself in the future to commit suicide should her condition get worse, and the difference between her in the memo and her in the present is clear as day. She becomes an absolute wreck by the end of it, and it's a shame since there's really nothing that can be done to fix it. Many big issues are tackled throughout the story, such as Alice's guilt upon learning she has passed her condition on to her daughter, even though she had no way of knowing she could have had this rare version of Alzheimer's considering her parents had died too early on for it to have been known to her. There is excellent chemistry between Alice and her daughter Lydia throughout the film, and the film ends with a touching, even if bittersweet moment between them. Just about anything that can go wrong does go wrong throughout the story, yet it remains realistically hopeful while diving into seriously dark themes.I would highly recommend this film to those who like drama. It's a very good film in general with an interesting premise, talented actors, and effective execution, and a fulfilling story that's handled with proper care.

A good film that deals with its topic maturely and sensitively, Julianne Moore carries her character gracefully and wholly convincingly. I also don't want to pass up the opportunity to give Kristen Stewart some rare praise, as she takes on a role far better suited to her than most, though it isn't an overwhelmingly challenging one.It's unfortunate that in spite of the film's overall integrity, there are some scenes that look like they were extracted directly from a Lifetime daytime TV movie. Otherwise, the film is a fairly simple but most effective examination of Alzheimer's Disease.

This is a film about how unfair life can be. A once happy marriage, both spouses with successful careers, looking forward to grandchildren, dissolves into a single focus, Alice's medical condition. Alice Howland (Julieanne Moore), is a linguistics professor at Columbia University and her husband a physician, is being sought after by the Minnesota Mayo Clinic.Alice knows something is wrong, others find her behavior odd or annoying, but no one would have guessed at age 50 her seeming absentmindedness is early onset Alzeheimers. Understandably, Alice attempts to keep her life as it once was. When her work performance slips she explains she has Alzheimers and plans to keep working. She is informed by the University that is not possible.Alice's husband is not the loving, caring husband you'd hope he'd be. He becomes annoyed and looks for opportunities to be away or at work. Two of her three children decided to be tested for early on set familial Alzheimer's disease. It does not have a happy ending, but with 10,000 people turning 65 everyday you might want to see this one in case this becomes your family's story.

I've been hearing for a while now that it's Julianne Moore's year. If you ask me, every year should be Julianne Moore's year, but nevertheless, this is the conventional wisdom being passed around by those who make their living spending an unseemly amount of time tracking the Academy Awards as if it were some sort of horse race that actually matters.Best that I can tell, 2014 was considered an unusually weak year in the Best Actress field, even by Hollywood's horrid standards of roles for women. I didn't think it was weak at all, but I suppose if we must restrict our choices to American films deemed by industry insiders as Oscar Contenders that were also released by distributors that can afford to mount multi-million dollar awards campaigns, then yes, it probably was. (Don't get me started.) So, much like a few years ago when Jeff Bridges received his lifetime achievement, gold-watch Oscar for a mediocre picture nobody saw, Julianne Moore has become the presumptive front-runner for a middling movie that hasn't even come out yet. She's overdue. Everybody loves her. It's time.It also helps that Still Alice is the kind of movie that wins Academy Awards. It's tasteful to a fault, exploring a terrifying subject with the utmost decorum. You feel bad when it's over, but not too bad. Adapted from Lisa Genova's novel by the married writing-directing team of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, the film stars Moore as Alice Howland, a super-cerebral linguistics professor at Columbia University, stricken with early onset Alzheimer's.There's no way for a movie about Alzheimer's disease to not be inherently horrifying. An awful part of life is that we all eventually learn to accept that our bodies will someday betray us, but the mind is a totally different matter. Losing physical ability is sadly inevitable; losing comprehension is the stuff of nightmares. Moore, a brilliant actress, does an expectedly outstanding job conveying Alice's slow drift away from the world. Confusion gives way to helplessness, and then terrible fear.If only the movie deserved Moore's precision work, and if only there were more to this character than the cheap irony of a language professor losing her words. Still Alice is set in the plush, weirdly stilted upper Manhattan that I only thought existed whenever Woody Allen used to try and make a tragedy about WASPs. Everything is so genteel and cushioned, exemplified by Alec Baldwin's uncharacteristically terrible turn as her research scientist husband, coiffed in a $500 haircut inexplicable for a lab rat while over-enunciating some seriously awkward dialogue.It all feels so timid and Hallmark-ish, particularly when stacked against previous, gut-wrenching Alzheimer's dramas like Iris and Away From Her, films that rooted around in the husband's POV with a conflicted, messy anxiety Still Alice keeps carefully at bay. This is a movie of pristine surfaces, and an over-determined camera strategy that has the other performers receding out of focus as Moore's facilities narrow.The one rogue element here is Kristen Stewart's outstanding performance as Moore's black-sheep daughter, who earned her mother's ire while struggling to get started as an actress in the downtown theatre scene. The rest of Still Alice's supporting cast (including a wretched Kate Bosworth) is fussy and self-conscious, Stewart simply is. There's such a rawness to her talent, so we all really need to get over the easy Twilight jokes and embrace her sullen unpredictability and lanky moments of unexpected grace. She's the real deal.Glatzer and Westmoreland certainly know what they've got here. In lieu of an ending of their own, they just have Stewart read aloud from Tony Kushner's Angels in America. She sells the heck out of an emotional crescendo that someone else wrote about a totally different frightening disease, so even the climax is borrowed and once-removed.I don't care whose year it is, these two actresses deserved better.