Still Alice

Julianne Moore gives an exquisite, understated performance in Still Alice, an adaptation of Lisa Genova’s 2007 bestselling début novel about a brilliant linguistics professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. Though the film falls within the purview of the terminal illness movie (a genre of limited scope that often seems to exist solely to provide an opportunity for great actors to strut their stuff) it never resorts to cloying sentimentality or gratuitously manipulative bleakness. The simple, straightforward picture follows Alice’s decline as the affliction sneaks up on her, forever changing her relationships, the way she’s viewed by the outside world, and her own perception of herself.

Married writing/directing team Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland [The Fluffer (2001), Quinceanera (2006), and The Last of Robin Hood (2013)] keep their adaptation tightly focused on family dynamics as well as the anguish Alice feels around losing her intellectual abilities and academic standing.  Genova’s choice to make Alice a renowned linguistics scholar makes the character’s memory loss and inability to communicate clearly all the more devastating. In the novel, Alice tells the story from her point of view, “for as long as she can tell it." I haven’t read the book, but I can imagine how effective a first person account from a narrator with declining facility for conveying her thoughts and recollections could be.

Glatzer and Westmoreland have no way to fully place us inside Alice’s head, the way an author can with the printed word, but they devise several techniques to subtly align the viewer to Alice’s perspective. For example, time passes by way of invisible ellipses. At the start of a scene, we’re often given no sense of whether events are taking place one hour or one month after what occurred in the preceding scene. Gaps in time and a limited number of characters are just two of many astute techniques the directors employ to keep their movie from becoming predictable or repetitive. It’s an impressively accomplished picture, especially considering that the last movie from this filmmaking duo was the unforgivably hackneyed Errol Flynn exposé The Last of Robin Hood, in which they availed themselves of every possible cliché the docudrama genre affords. They seem to have gotten all their bad instincts out on Robin Hood, because, with the exception of the occasional maudlin piano solos, this film is remarkably free of TV movie tactics. 

Of course, Moore’s performance is the main reason to see the film. She brings a deep honesty, vulnerability, and dignity to the role. Moore’s expressive face instantly conveys to the audience everything Alice thinks and feels in the first half of the film. As the disease takes over, that same face slowly becomes an opaque window of mysteries and secrets we cannot access.  Glatzer and Westmoreland surround Moore with perfectly cast supporting players; from a solid, non-ironic Alec Baldwin as her loving but self-involved husband, to Stephen Kunken’s direct but sensitive turn as her neurologist. The best supporting performance comes from Kristen Stewart as Alice’s youngest daughter Lydia. The strained relationship between Alice, the organized, accomplished, academic, and Lydia, the searching, free-spirited, actor, gives Still Alice its emotional arc. Though the basic plot follows the linear progression of the various stages of Alzheimer's, the film is thematically structured around the small and unforced turns in this mother/daughter connection. This subtle narrative construct along with all the simple but artful choices made in front of and behind the camera prevent Still Alice from ever falling into any disease-of-the-week contrivances or Oscar-baiting grandiloquence.