The story here is quite simple. A young (50) college professor, Alice Howland (played by Julianne Moore), is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. We follow her subsequent decline and its effects on her family.
Unfortunately for this movie, this story has been told before in Iris (2001) and told, it has to be said, with far greater honesty and impact. By comparison, Still Alice is more like an episode from a Hollywood soap opera than a serious attempt to portray the effects of this horrible disease (which my mother suffered from). The characters are thinly drawn, the script is at times banal and the story doesn't go anywhere.
One of the genuinely moving moments in the film is that Alice, foreseeing her forthcoming incapacity, records a set of instructions telling herself how to end it all with pills, this to be played when she can no longer remember certain key facts about her life. But when this time comes, Alice is incapable of carrying out her own instructions. The story is left with nowhere to go and ends later abruptly (and to the surprise of everyone in the theatre) with a message to the effect that 'it's all about love'. Noble sentiment but unsatisfactory cinema. It would have made a far more effective and poignant conclusion if Alice had managed to kill herself. That really would have given us something to think about. But that, perhaps, was seen as a step too far by the film-makers.
I must admit that I have never really rated Julianne Moore as an actor. To me she always looks as if she's acting. But following her Oscar award I thought twice. Sadly, my view has not changed. She did not bring enough of the bitterness, the anger, the desperation, the sheer cruel mindlessness of dementia. One can only assume that the Academicians were honouring the subject matter as much as the acting. Watch Judi Dench as Iris Murdoch, disintegrating, falling, fading with so much expressed not in words but by her face and eyes, a gut-wrenching performance that is simply in a different league. In fact the outstanding performance for me came from Kristen Stewart playing Alice's youngest daughter.
I was hoping for more from Still Alice. But I was disappointed.
(Viewed at Screen 2, The Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK, 8th March 2015)
Unfortunately for this movie, this story has been told before in Iris (2001) and told, it has to be said, with far greater honesty and impact. By comparison, Still Alice is more like an episode from a Hollywood soap opera than a serious attempt to portray the effects of this horrible disease (which my mother suffered from). The characters are thinly drawn, the script is at times banal and the story doesn't go anywhere.
One of the genuinely moving moments in the film is that Alice, foreseeing her forthcoming incapacity, records a set of instructions telling herself how to end it all with pills, this to be played when she can no longer remember certain key facts about her life. But when this time comes, Alice is incapable of carrying out her own instructions. The story is left with nowhere to go and ends later abruptly (and to the surprise of everyone in the theatre) with a message to the effect that 'it's all about love'. Noble sentiment but unsatisfactory cinema. It would have made a far more effective and poignant conclusion if Alice had managed to kill herself. That really would have given us something to think about. But that, perhaps, was seen as a step too far by the film-makers.
I must admit that I have never really rated Julianne Moore as an actor. To me she always looks as if she's acting. But following her Oscar award I thought twice. Sadly, my view has not changed. She did not bring enough of the bitterness, the anger, the desperation, the sheer cruel mindlessness of dementia. One can only assume that the Academicians were honouring the subject matter as much as the acting. Watch Judi Dench as Iris Murdoch, disintegrating, falling, fading with so much expressed not in words but by her face and eyes, a gut-wrenching performance that is simply in a different league. In fact the outstanding performance for me came from Kristen Stewart playing Alice's youngest daughter.
I was hoping for more from Still Alice. But I was disappointed.
(Viewed at Screen 2, The Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK, 8th March 2015)