It’s likely that both the Best Actor and Best Actress winners at this year’s Academy Awards will go to portrayals of people suffering from chronic neurodegenerative diseases. The films couldn’t be more different, however. In The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne plays Stephen Hawking, who was struck with Lou Gehrig’s disease (or ALS) more than 50 years ago and is miraculously still alive, if a paraplegic who speaks through a computer. The film is a saccharine triumph-over-adversity tale that ends with adoring fans cheering him on. In Still Alice, Julianne Moore plays a fictional woman who develops early onset Alzheimer’s disease. The story is not about triumph, but about the slow degradation of Alice’s once lively brain and perfect life and, secondarily, how that affects her loving family. It’s as subtle and sad as The Theory of Everything is obvious and uplifting. In fact, Still Alice may be the saddest movie I’ve ever seen.
Alice Howland is a renowned professor of linguistics at Columbia University, married to a handsome and successful scientist named John (Alec Baldwin), and mother to three children, slightly petulant Ann (Kate Bosworth), bright and handsome Tom (Hunter Parrish), and struggling actress Lydia (Kristen Stewart). When she starts forgetting things, like her lectures or her keys or how to get home during a run or, worse for a linguistics scholar, her words, she goes to a neurologist, who seems at first not concerned, and then as the forgetting worsens, quite concerned. She keeps the problems hidden from John for a while until her doctor convinces Alice that, yes, this is early onset Alzheimer’s, and her cognitive functioning will only get worse.
They then tell the children and, to make matters worse, tell them that this kind of Alzheimer’s is genetic, so they might get it too. As Alice’s condition worsens, the forgetting becomes constant, and the humiliations almost totalizing, you’ll probably be unable to stop from crying.
There are some moments of brightness. The shifting of Alice and Lydia’s relationship, from Alice sternly mothering her daughter to Lydia becoming a sweet mother-like figure to Alice as she declines, is the only truly inspiring subplot. A scene featuring a struggling Alice giving a speech and then cheered on by a moved audience is also cheerful, but it’s also too clichéd – it’s basically the exact same scene as the climax of The Theory of Everything. Aside from these, the film is wrenchingly sad, with every moment barreling toward a foregone conclusion. There is no cure for Alzheimer’s.
Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, the gay couple who also wrote and directed Quinceañera and The Fluffer, do a great job with the source material, a pedantic novel by a neuroscientist, but I wish they’d done more to make it more than a dramatic clinical case study. It’s a snuff film; it’s a stunningly well-acted, sensitively written, finely directed, full-of-prestige snuff film. Aside from Julianne Moore’s performance, which is truly a great depiction of struggle and sadness, seeing the film seems unnecessary for anyone who goes to films to be entertained or enlightened. To be fair, if you don’t have any experience with Alzheimer’s, you will learn something.
If you feel the need to see Moore give an Oscar-worthy performance before the awards broadcast, I suggest going back to Boogie Nights, The Hours, Far from Heaven, A Single Man, or, in a few weeks, Maps to the Stars, in which she’s even better than she is in Still Alice.
Still Alice
Written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland
Starring Julianne Moore, Kristen Stewart and Alec Baldwin
Rated PG-13
At Landmark Hillcrest
