Slipping Away

Julianne Moore delivers the goods in 'Still Alice '

Julianne Moore has racked up accolade after accolade for her performance in Still Alice, including an Academy Award nomination, and it’s easy to see why. Moore is excellent as Alice Howland, a brilliant linguistics expert and professor at Columbia University succumbing to early onset Alzheimer’s. She’s so good you may forget it’s her on screen. Moore—and forgive me for using this cliché—disappears completely into the role.

 

The story begins with Alice’s 50th birthday, when she’s already forgetting small things. At a dinner, for instance, she confuses her daughter Anna (Kate Bosworth) with her long-deceased sister Anne. Soon Alice forgets other things, like a segue in a lecture she’s given countless times, or that she’s met her son’s new girlfriend.

 

When she gets lost jogging her regular route, she becomes scared. And because Alice is the type of person who thrives on intellectual stimuli, words and her memories, she becomes concerned enough to see a neurologist.

 

Ultimately, she’s given the worst news: She has early onset Alzheimer’s, and her mind is deteriorating rapidly.

 

For the next 75 minutes or so, we watch as Alice slowly becomes less and less like herself. It’s heartbreaking. At first, Alice is determined not to be a burden to her family, and watching her frustration with her occasional mental lapses grows more and more painful, especially when she can’t remember why she’s frustrated with herself. Her husband, John (Alec Baldwin toeing the line between know-it-all and attentive spouse), and her children, including youngest daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart), an aspiring actor who lives in Los Angeles, do their best to help and to cope.

 

That’s really all there is to Still Alice. It’s an assured piece of drama, and with Moore’s commanding performance—and Alzheimer’s—it has all the gravitas it needs.

 

One of the movie’s welcome surprises is Stewart, who’s not known for playing characters with whom we sympathize—or even characters we like. But her performance is on par with Moore’s.

 

Lydia is the black sheep in the family. She skipped college to embark on an acting career while her sister attended an Ivy League school. Her brother, meanwhile, is in medical school following in his father’s footsteps.

 

There are scenes early on with Alice and Lydia butting heads over what Alice considers Lydia’s indirection, and Lydia makes a subtle but conscious choice at some point to be the good, compassionate daughter her mother always wanted. She mends her relationship with her mother and helps her father through with a difficult decision concerning Alice’s care.

 

There are plenty of scenes of quiet strength in Still Alice. Moore and Stewart’s scenes together give the film some additional weight. Better yet is that the movie tells its story in a straightforward matter. There’s little comfort for an audience that isn’t prepared to watch a movie’s main character slowly become a wisp of her former self.

 

If Still Alice has a stumbling block, it’s the overbearing score. In a movie where everything else is matter-of-fact, the melodramatic music stands out. But that’s a small gripe in an otherwise captivating and devastating story.

 

STILL ALICE

Directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland

With Moore, Stewart and Baldwin

UA DeVargas 6

PG-13
101 min.

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