When we refer to an actor’s performance as breathtaking, we’re usually engaging in hyperbole. Rarely do we mean that it actually affected our ability to breathe.
But, during “Still Alice,” watching the vital, sharply intelligent woman played by Julianne Moore slowly cede her mental faculties—and, most painfully, her identity—to Alzheimer’s disease, I found myself frequently needing to gulp in big breaths of air, merely to steel myself for the next scene.
Of course, this is partly due to the nature of the material. There’s no way to tell a story about Alzheimer’s that isn’t ultimately devastating, and writer-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland clearly have no intention of sugar-coating the cruelty of this disease.
But, as its title suggests, the movie based on the novel by neuroscientist Lisa Genova, is about one woman, and thankfully we have Moore, one of Tinseltown’s most sensitive actresses, in the role. She delivers a warm, brave and shattering performance here—one that’s already earning accolades, and deserves many more before the awards season ends.
We first meet Alice, a linguistics professor at Columbia, as she’s celebrating her 50th birthday with family. Chic and accomplished, she’s managed to work and travel, and raise three adult kids in a beautiful home. She and her husband, John (Alec Baldwin), also an academic, live in a lovely brownstone with a great kitchen.
Connections
But, one day, giving a lecture, Alice suddenly stops, midsentence. She can’t remember a key word. She recovers nimbly with a joke, but we shudder.
Back home, taking her usual jog around campus, she gets lost. The camera blurs, along with the connections in her brain. We shudder again. We know what’s coming: The diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s!
Time passes—too quickly, of course. Alice tries to keep working, but that proves unrealistic. Also unrealistic: that loved ones, in such circumstances, would behave like saints. Of course, they don’t.
Alice’s younger daughter Lydia (an excellent Kristen Stewart), going through a self-indulgent phase, struggles to make room for her mother’s affliction. And John, as subtly portrayed by Baldwin, has trouble balancing his devotion to his wife, with fears for the future—and his own career goals.
A bitter twist is that Alice is a linguistics professor—an expert at communicating. As her abilities fade, she agrees nonetheless to address a medical conference, and we’re so afraid to see her get up there, a trembling shadow of the confident teacher she once was. But, this scene—and the message she manages to impart—is one of the film’s most powerful. AP