Julianne Moore deserves all the praise she got for this movie, but the film itself wasn't nearly as well-received. And I don't know why. Timely, tragic, poignant, and beautiful, Still Alice was perhaps the most emotionally brutal film of last season's Oscar race. Not unlike 2013's similarly underpraised August: Osage County, this film depicts a horror that plagues us all in a manner both iconic and empowering. In our Age of Information, what could be more devastating than a disease that infects our brain and makes us lose sight of our knowledge, experiences, and memories? That is the phenomenon Still Alice seeks to explore.
Moore infuses great charisma and even greater compassion into her character -- who we know from the first scene to be doomed -- and allows us to understand every single step on her complex emotional journey. Her family, including Alec Baldwin, Kate Bosworth, Kristen Stewart, and Hunter Parrish, are no less praiseworthy for their raw reactions and vulnerable sympathies. Writer/directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland wrote an uncommonly intelligent screenplay and directed the film with such an objective approach that the film avoids needless sentimentality.
Perhaps our directors' greatest triumph is in their empathetic approach to such a devastating, terminal disease. They effectively put us inside the protagonist's world, withholding some contextual information from us so that we feel as bewildered as the woman with Alzheimer's. She goes running around her campus (Columbia), and halfway through the background blurs while we zoom in on her face, registering her pain and confusion while being completely unable to help her find her way. Later, she gets lost in her own home when she tries to find the bathroom, in a scene strikingly reminiscent of one in The Judge, and her embarrassment is almost too much to watch.
The climax of the film comes when our hero makes a seemingly foolproof plan to end her own suffering via an overdose of sleeping pills. The directors make a dangerous gamble -- but one that pays off brilliantly -- by infusing the scene with more comedy than in the rest of the film. Poor Moore views the video message (given by herself) but forgets the suicide instructions before she can carry them out. Time and again she tries, until finally she is interrupted by her nurse and spills them. Finally, when the disease has progressed so much as to destroy her ability to speak (did I mention? She's a linguistics professor. Sound like Wit (2001) much?), her aspiring actor daughter (played effectively by Kristen Stewart) reads Angels in America to her. After reading a section, she asks her mother what the monologue was about. "Love" is her response. And as the lights come up in the house, everybody was sobbing.
IMDb: Still Alice
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