HitFix
TORONTO – Julianne Moore has already had quite a
year. In May, she surprised many by taking the best actress honor at the
Cannes Film Festival for David Cronenberg’s “Map to the Stars.” On Monday night, “Still Alice” premiered at
the 2014 Toronto Film Festival and it may feature one of the finest
performances of her already illustrious career.
If you were to read a short synopsis about “Alice,” an adaptation of Lisa
Genova’s 2007 novel, you might be slightly concerned. The film introduces
us to Alice Howland, a Columbia University professor in linguistics who has
balanced a successful career with a happy marriage and three grown
children. She’s just turned 50, but notices that she’s starting to forget
things. Specific words are dropping out of her mind. She’ll be in the
middle of a lecture and forget a phrase or subject matter. Eventually she
goes to a neurologist who reveals she early onset Alzheimer’s. It’s rare
for her age, but it’s a familial condition she likely inherited from a father
she rarely saw in his later years. Rapidly deteriorating, Alice has to
decide how she’ll live out the rest of her life knowing she’ll be a burden to
the rest of her family.
In the hands of the wrong director(s), “Alice” could be overly melodramatic
and laced with saccharine moments meant to force a happy ending. Richard
Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland won’t let that happen. The duo behind the
critically acclaimed “Quinceanera” let “Alice’s” narrative unspool in as
restrained a manner as possible. There are no unbelievable hysterics.
There are no self-aware screaming matches. Instead, the focus is on
Moore’s heartbreaking depiction of a woman slowly losing her focus, her memory
and, to some extent, herself.
Moore’s performance here is reminiscent of her breakthrough role in Todd
Haynes ‘ “Safe” and her Oscar-nominated turn in Stephen Daldry’s “The
Hours.” In each scene she peels a little bit more of Alice away as the
emotional pain of the disease takes its toll. It is incredibly subtle work
that has to have been painstakingly thought out. You only realize this,
however, walking out of the theater. Moore won’t let you see her working
behind the curtain. Another Toronto debut, “The Theory of Everything,” has
earned raves for Eddie Redmayne’s stark transformation into Stephen
Hawking. Moore’s work here is just as transformative as Redmayne’s, but
her arc is mental rather than physical. As anyone who has a relative or
friend who has suffered from Alzheimer’s disease knows the Alice we meet at the
beginning of the film will not be the Alice we meet at the end. And
because of that the film lives and dies on Moore’s portrayal. She succeeds
smashingly.
Glatzer and Westmoreland put an accomplished ensemble around Moore to play
Alice’s family including Alec Baldwin, Kate Bosworth, Kristen Stewart and Hunter Parrish. Stewart, as Alice’s
youngest daughter, is the family member who seems to be affected by her
mother’s deterioration the most (and earns the most screen time), but all of
the actors clearly know they are there to support Moore. This is Alice’s
story and no one else’s.
Below the line, cinematographer Denis Lenoir avoids the Hollywood sheen
instead composing a delicate and natural look. Ilan Eshkeri (“The Young
Victoria”) deserves a special mention for his beautiful score that also avoids
unnecessarily pulling the audience’s heartstrings.
Read more at
http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/review-julianne-moore-is-shattering-in-wonderfully-restrained-still-alice#UqAryfjUqVxsjJs4.99
The Hollywood Reporter
With some five million Americans (and 36 million world-wide) living with
Alzheimer’s disease, the warm, compassionate but bitingly honest Still
Alice will touch home for many people. The toll the disease takes on the
life of a brilliant linguistics professor is superbly detailed by
Julianne Moore in a performance that is one of her career
highs, driving straight to the terror of the disease and its power to wipe out
personal certainties and identity. Written and directed by Richard
Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, the screenplay is
faithful to Lisa Genova’s best-selling novel
which has a fan base of its own.
Rather than focus on the destructive effect of the disease on relationships,
the drama dives deep into how one woman experiences her own deteriorating
condition, placing all the emphasis on Moore’s face and reactions, her
vulnerability seesawing with her strength. This insider’s account would be a
tall order for any actor to fill without resorting to sentimentality or falling
into the obvious, but she never loses control of the film for a second, with
able support from Kristen Stewart, Alec Baldwin, Kate Bosworth
and Hunter Parrish as family members. The involvement
of the Alzheimer’s Association and executive producing names like
Christine Vauchon, Maria Shriver and
Trudie Styler will offer an additional leg up, although
word-of-mouth should provide the strongest incentive for audiences leery of the
topic.
Alice Howland is a vivacious, charming 50-year-old New Yorker and a respected
intellectual who is a precision communicator. Her loving husband John (Baldwin)
calls her the smartest, most beautiful woman he’s ever met, and their three
grown children Anna (Bosworth), Tom (Parrish) and aspiring actress Lydia
(Stewart) are, if not success stories, at least making their way in life. Alice
has it all—until she begins to forget words, which are her livelihood as a
Columbia linguistics teacher, and worse, starts to lose her bearings in familiar
places. She’s frightened enough to consult a neurologist who rules out a brain
tumor, but hypothesizes early-onset Alzheimer’s, a rare form of the disease that
strikes people under 65.
Alice’s first reaction is to hide it, but after getting confused about a
dinner guest, she makes her husband privy to her fears. As her doctor tells them
bluntly, her disease is genetic and the chances of their children contracting it
are 50%. It falls on the family like a bomb, especially when one of the kids
tests positive for the rogue gene. But this bad news is quickly sidelined by
Alice’s own mental decline as the disease makes terrible, swift progress. While
her family tries to cope with the situation, or miserably fails to do so, the
cast’s ensemble performance brings out their true colors, which include some
surprising role changes.
Despite a 2-hour running time, the drama is swift-moving, perhaps because the
viewer dreads the disease's progression and wishes time would stop for poor
Alice. But it doesn't stop and step by step she descends the cognitive ladder,
not suffering so much as struggling to stay connected. In one stand-out scene,
she stumbles onto suicide instructions she has left for herself on her computer.
Though this is one of the film's most intense scenes, the directors are able to
slip in a moment's humor to lighten things up.
Not all is doom and gloom here. Another key scene has Alice invited to
address an Alzheimer's conference. Her anxious preparations end in a triumphant
monolog about her condition that is truly touching.
Westmoreland and Glatzer have created drama around the porn industry (The
Fluffer), the Mexican community in Los Angeles (Quinceanera) and
Errol Flynn’s last fling with a teenage girl (The Last of Robin Hood.)
Still Alice has a concentration and urgency in the telling that the
other films lack. Not directors known for daring cinematic fireworks or
experimentation, here they tackle a subject where a restrained, understated
approach is the best insurance against sloppy sentimentality. It pays off
handsomely in the film’s closing moments, a poignant, poetic confrontation
between the generations that draws the best from Moore and reveals unexpected
depth in Stewart. The film's extremely personal feeling is surely related to the
fact that Glatzer directed it while undergoing a health crisis of his own after
being diagnosed with ALS and having to co-direct the movie on an iPad using a
text-to-speech app.
Tech work remains humbly in the background, all in the service of keeping the
spotlight focused on Moore and mimicking her feelings with an out of focus
camera, costumes she no longer chooses herself, and so on.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie/still-alice/review/731334
Variety
When the movies deal with Alzheimer’s, they nearly always approach it
from the vantage of the family members who are painfully forgotten as loved ones
lose their memories. “Still Alice”
shows the process from the victim’s p.o.v., and suddenly the disease isn’t just
something sad that happens to other people, but a condition we can relate to
firsthand. Julianne Moore
guides us through the tragic arc of how it must feel to disappear before one’s
own eyes, accomplishing one of her most powerful performances by underplaying
the scenario — a low-key approach that should serve this dignified indie
well in limited release.
Based on the novel by neuroscientist Lisa Genova, “Still Alice” gives new
meaning to the phrase, “It happens to the best of us.” Columbia professor Alice
Howland is the sort of character who, even without Alzheimer’s to contend with,
is accomplished and interesting enough to warrant her own movie. She has
achieved much in her 50-odd years, both as a respected scholar and mother of
three grown children, played by Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth and Hunter
Parrish.
For the otherwise healthy Alice, there’s no good reason why Alzheimer’s
should strike now, nearly 15 years before it traditionally occurs, although, as
her doctor points out, the condition can actually be harder to diagnose in
intelligent people, since they’re capable of devising elaborate work-arounds
that mask the problem. Genova’s book hit especially close to home for
husband-and-husband helmers Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland
(“Quinceanera”), since Glatzer suffers from ALS — another degenerative condition
that systematically attacks one’s sense of self.
At first, it’s just a word that goes missing in the middle of one of Alice’s
linguistics lectures. But the situation gets scarier when she loses track of
where she is during her daily jog. Since Alice’s disease involves short-term
memory loss, a number of the tests she faces are ones the audience can take
alongside, with the inevitable result that we start to reflect on the blind
spots in our memory. Forgetting things isn’t unusual even among perfectly
healthy adults, making it easy to identify with Moore, who plays her initial
concerns quite casually.
It’s not until Alice learns that the disease is hereditary that the severity
of her situation sets in:
As if it weren’t bad enough that she will eventually cease to recognize her own
children, Alice may also be responsible for passing the condition along to them.
This is a tragedy, pure and simple, and yet the directing duo refuses to milk
the family’s situation for easy tears. Instead, the idea is to put us inside
Alice’s head. We experience disorientation as she would, suggested by a shallow
depth of field where things shown out of focus appear to be just beyond her
comprehension.
Alice’s diagnosis calls for a form of grieving, during
which she tries coming to terms with the fact that life as it had
previously existed is now over. She tells the department chair at Columbia U.,
where she taught, about her Alzheimer’s and is promptly dismissed from her
position. She gets lost in her own home and is easily overwhelmed whenever she
steps out of it. Though her husband John (Alec Balwin) aims to be supportive, he
refuses to let her condition derail his own professional life. Alice begs him to
take a year off work so they can be together before she’s too far gone to
experience her own life, making visits to retirement homes and making
contingency plans (a bottle of sleeping pills stashed at the back of a dresser
drawer) for the day when she can no longer answer a series of personal questions
about her life.
The directorial couple must have gone through something very similar when
Glatzer’s ALS kicked in, forcing him to accept that his body had become his
greatest enemy. The pair bring that personal connection to the writing process,
emphasizing Alice’s emotions over those of her various family members
— although Stewart, whose character steps in as caregiver at one point,
gets several intimate, unshowy scenes with Moore. The helmers have made a
conscious decision to keep things quiet, commissioning a score from British
composer that doesn’t tell you how to feel, but rather how she feels: lost,
emotional and anxious most of the time.
Clearly, Glatzer has not yet given up, and neither does Alice, despite her
relatively rapid degeneration. It’s a devastating thing to watch the light of
recognition dwindle in her eyes, to see the assertive, confident lecturer that
she had so recently been reduced to the nervous, scared woman we see delivering
one last speech at an Alzheimer’s society confab. After the stiff lifelessness
of “The Last of Robin Hood,” the helmers have made a near-total recovery,
shooting things in such a way that activity is constantly spilling beyond the
edges of the frame, giving the impression that characters’ lives continue when
they’re not on camera, even as Alice’s seems to be closing in around her. Just as her kids look for
ever-fainter signs of their mother behind those eyes, we lean in to watch Moore
the actress turn invisible within her own skin.
http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/toronto-film-review-julianne-moore-in-still-alice-1201301421/
Screendaily
Offered as proof that there actually might be some things worse than
death — or at least more heartbreaking — the exquisite Still Alice
presents the sad story of Alice Howland, a brilliant linguistics professor
decimated by early-onset Alzheimer’s. A melodrama of substance, the new film
from writer-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland
(Quinceañera) is led by a precise performance from Julianne Moore, but
the film is really an ensemble piece that looks closely at one family’s
struggles when its matriarch is alive but slowly losing herself piece by
piece.
Tearjerkers get a bad rap because of how shamelessly manipulative they are,
but Still Alice earns its tears by exploring emotional terrain with
restraint and insight.
Still Alice premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and should be an
art-house player thanks to a cast that also includes Alec Baldwin, Kristen
Stewart and Kate Bosworth. Good reviews for Moore’s performance will attract
viewers, and readers of the source material (Lisa Genova’s original novel) may
be intrigued as well. Although there might be a concern that the subject will be
too heavy for some audiences, the modest indie success of the low-budget
Away From Her (also about Alzheimer’s) suggests that discriminating
crowds will be game.
Moore plays Alice, an author who lectures on linguistics and teaches at
Columbia University as the film begins. But tragedy is about to intervene: Even
though she’s only 50, she notices that she keeps forgetting vital things, such
as where she is when going for a jog through New York City, even though she’s
taken the route many times before. Soon after, she’s diagnosed with early-onset
Alzheimer’s, being told by her doctor that the condition will only get worse.
The bulk of the film concerns how she and her family, including her husband John
(Baldwin) and daughters Lydia (Stewart) and Anna (Bosworth), cope with the
news.
Preferring a spare, understated style, Glatzer and Westmoreland mostly let
the inherent sadness of the situation speak for itself. (Occasionally, though,
Ilan Eshkeri’s score can become a little self-consciously frenetic, a clumsy
attempt to echo Alice’s panic at her worsening memory loss.) But despite the
rare tonal lapses, the film does a remarkable job of homing in on the story’s
core terror: Alice is still physically well and could live a long life, but her
essence — her mind, her memories and her spark — will soon disappear
forever.
In the wrong hands, this is the stuff of disease-of-the-week sentimentality,
but Still Alice stays away from that terrain by focusing less on the
illness than on the emotional effects it has on all involved. Of course, the
movie is most interested in Alice’s reactions to her diagnosis, but no one in
her immediate circle is immune to these changes. Baldwin is particularly good as
an ambitious medical researcher who is losing not just his wife but also a woman
who was as driven as he was. John shows plenty of compassion for Alice, but
Baldwin also reveals the cracks in the husband’s patience, powerless to bring
back the woman he once knew, even though she’s right there.
Still Alice is such a rich, well-observed piece that it even finds
time to flesh out Alice’s daughters. In the beginning, Anna is the favoured,
successful child while Lydia is the disappointment floundering in a go-nowhere
acting career out in Los Angeles. But once Alice’s condition is spotted, the two
daughters respond in different ways and for very specific, understandable
reasons. With nuance, Bosworth and Stewart both play women who seem to have been profoundly shaped by their impressive mother, and we feel the characters’
confusion at having her influence suddenly ripped away from them. (Stewart
especially shines, initially playing a prototypical starving-artist type who
surprises her family by her response to Alice’s diagnosis.)
As for Moore, this is one of her most complete, layered performances. Almost
20 years ago, she starred in filmmaker Todd Haynes’ Safe, a revelatory
social parable-cum-psychological horror movie about a housewife seemingly
allergic to the entire world. The more realistic Still Alice finds her
again felled by an invisible malady — one just as frightening — and it’s
interesting to note her ability in both films to elicit our sympathy so easily.
Expertly modulating her facial expressions as Alice becomes more childlike as
her disease advances, Moore externalises the character’s anger and fear, the
sense that she can feel her mind going but can’t reverse the damage.
But at the same time, it’s not an overly showy performance: There aren’t a lot
of for-you-consideration grand dramatic scenes, a modesty that makes Alice’s
slow descent all the more painful and human.
To be sure, some will find Still Alice too depressing, too mawkish
or too insular to embrace. (Because the Howlands are a well-to-do family, it’s
inevitable that a criticism levelled against the film will be that it reeks of
upper-class privilege.) But such complaints seem petty in the face of such a
quiet, absorbing film. Tearjerkers get a bad rap because of how shamelessly
manipulative they are, but Still Alice earns its tears by exploring
emotional terrain with restraint and insight. This is a movie about a woman with
Alzheimer’s, but it’s really about a family reassessing its bonds. And although
none of the characters mentions death, this is one of the most poignant movies
about mortality in quite a while: The Howlands are grieving for a person who
isn’t actually going anywhere, except in all the ways that really count.
http://www.screendaily.com/reviews/the-latest/still-alice/5077342.article?blocktitle=REVIEWS&contentID=40296
Refined Geekery
Still Alice is an absolutely heart-wrenching tale of a film. Based on the 2009
novel by Lisa Genova, Still Alice follow’s Julianne Moore as Alice Howland, a
Columbia University professor of linguistics who is diagnosed not long after her
50th birthday with a case of early onset
Alzheimer’s disease. What follows is about an hour and a half of coping with the
slow degradation of one’s mind in the company of their loving family (a stellar
cast that includes Alec Baldwin as her husband, and Kristen Stewart, Kate
Bosworth, and Hunter Parrish as their three children). I was lucky enough to see
the film as part of the Toronto International Film Festival this year at the
beautiful Winter Garden Theatre, and after wiping away the single tear that
lingered throughout the entire viewing experience, I thought I would share my
thoughts.
First off, this is a beautifully shot film. The directorial couple,
husband and husband Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (co-directors of
Quinceanera), don’t work to create anything overly flashy, nor do they rest on
depressing imagery. There are some visual tricks like out of focus shots or
field of view disruptions that add to the internal frenzy Moore’s character was
no doubt feeling, yet other than these, what you have are some beautiful static
shots that chew scenery like Columbia University’s beautiful campus, or the
beach in what I am guessing is the Hamptons. There are also some long running
shots where you get to feel the life of New York City, an already chaotic
atmosphere only made more so by the knowledge we the audience have of the mental challenges the title character faces.
Yet it is the subtlety of the performances that make this film. Rather than focusing on the outsider’s perspective watching the deterioration of Alice’s mental acuity, we instead follow it from Alice’s point of view. It was important, I imagine, for Genova to make a professor the focal point of the story, someone to whom their brain has been the single most necessary tool in crafting their life to date. Not only that, but she is a professor of linguistics, or more broadly communication and language, two of the more impacted faculties of Alzheimer’s disease. Watching Moore progress from her initial lectures to the shell of who she once was is absolutely heartbreaking.
And yet, her determination to hold on as long as possible throughout the film is
completely endearing and heart-warming. While the supporting cast is great at
everything they do in this film, the whole effort hinges on Moore’s performance
and it is one of her strongest to date. You will no doubt see this film making
Oscar buzz come this coming holiday season.
This film had deeply touched the Toronto audience, and with the Q&A after
the film, you got a sense from all parties involved, the directors, producers,
and the stars, that Alzheimer’s disease was something they respected fully and
wanted to deliver properly. I think it is safe to say that their goals were
achieved with great success as a long standing ovation greeted them all as they
walked on and off the stage. This film is a must see.
http://refinedgeekery.com/2014/09/09/tiff-2014-still-alice-dir-richard-glatzer-and-wash-westmoreland-review/
Buzzfeed
TORONTO — “I wish I had cancer,” Alice Howland
(Julianne Moore) tells her husband John (Alec Baldwin) in the new movie Still
Alice, which recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The Columbia University linguistic professor just found out she has early onset
Alzheimer’s disease, a form of dementia that has no cure. The sad irony that
she’s spent her career studying and teaching words only to lose nearly all of
them is not lost on the audience or on Alice. When someone has cancer, Alice
explains, people wear ribbons. But no one does the same when you can’t find the
words to make small talk, or any talk at all.
Still Alice, directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, who
also wrote the screenplay from Lisa Genova’s novel, documents just that — the
progression of an early onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis from discovery to nearly
complete incoherence. The film opens with Alice’s 50th birthday party where her
husband John, son Tom (Hunter Parrish), and older daughter Anna (Kate Bosworth)
are having dinner to celebrate. At one point, Anna complains to her husband
Charlie (Shane McRae) that her younger sister Lydia (Kristen Stewart) is selfish
for not having flown to the East Coast from her home in Los Angeles to join
them. As Anna talks about her strained relationship with her sister, Alice
interjects, as if to correct her: “My sister and I were very close.” Anna and
Charlie clarify that they were speaking about Anna and Lydia’s relationship, not
Alice’s with her late sister. And just like that, the moment is over.
There are a few similar instances in the beginning of the film, subtle hints
dropped here and there that are so small, the audience might miss them. But
that’s the point. Alzheimer’s, at first, affects moments so irrelevant to
everyday life that no one would stop to question the misunderstanding. But then,
as if overnight, Alice’s symptoms become more apparent. And once her diagnosis
is confirmed, her mental deterioration is accelerated.
Still Alice is a difficult film to watch. Seeing Alice’s loving
husband and three children care for her is incredibly distressing, and the
moments in which she doesn’t recognize her own daughter is downright
heartbreaking. But what is most painful are the scenes in which the viewer feels
the effects of the disease from Alice’s perspective. As her condition worsens,
this story is told in a way in which the audience essentially experiences
Alice’s surroundings as much (or as little) as she does, only gaining a few
additional pieces of information beyond what Alice sees, knows, and
understands.
And because of the way the story is told, viewers experience the
disorientation and isolation that come with Alzheimer’s. There is no sense of
how much time has passed for Alice or the viewer. In one scene, she comments on
how something happened the night before and John is heard whispering that the
event actually occurred a month prior. When Alice loses focus on the world
around her, so does the frame in which moviegoers see it. While films have
tackled Alzheimer’s before, it’s unique and poignantly harrowing to experience
the effects of the disease through the victim’s eyes as Still Alice
manages to achieve.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/emilyorley/this-harrowing-movie-about-early-onset-alzheimers-is-unlike?utm_term=257aigs#1k949it
Lainey Gossip
Julianne Moore’s unrelenting commitment to her characters and epic crying face
merits a thousand viral video super-cuts. Critically appreciated, but woefully
under-awarded, 2014 could be the year she receives her fifth (or sixth) Oscar
nomination with her prodigious turns in both Still Alice, and Maps
to the Stars.
But, as Maps gears up for a 2015 release, her electrifying, and
polarizing portrayal of a desperate falling star will remain unseen by many –
for now. Her chances now lie with Still Alice, where Moore plays a
linguistics professor who suffers from early on-set Alzheimer’s, and is
reluctantly tended to by her husband John (Alec Baldwin) and youngest daughter
Lydia (Kristen Stewart).
“Hollywood Alzheimer’s” has become a played-out cliché of extreme anger and
sentimental gloom, ranging from Richard Jenkins’ turn as Justin Timberlake’s
wistful father in the subpar Friends with Benefits, to that very
special episode of Full House. However, with Still Alice, we
see the frustration and mental decay from the patient’s viewpoint, as Moore’s
Alice begins to forget the very words she used to build her career and
reputation at Columbia University. Instead of bigging up the symptoms and
alienation of her loved ones, her intellectual capacity and recognition slowly
falls out of her grasp. It’s only when she loses her sense of direction while
out on a jog that she realizes she, at 50, might be more than absent-minded, and
none are more surprised than John.
Immediately, she rushes to her own defence, leaving clues and sleeping pills
around the house, recording videos on her laptop with hints and tricks, and
forcing her eldest daughter Anna (Kate Bosworth) to play as many games of Words with Friends with her as possible. She’s desperate to regain her facilities, and refuses to lose her strength, rarely bursting into the tears that have become
Moore’s trademark. But we quickly see Alice’s short-term memory decline and
disorientation is coming, fast and furious. Soon, answering her own memory
quizzes on her iPhone and remembering timelines becomes a struggle, as do tasks
like getting dressed, or using the bathroom. She pleads with her husband to take
time off from his medical career to spend a year together as husband and wife
while she can create new memories, but he rejects her appeal, instead aiming to
advance his own ambition.
As the ambitious Alice, the fire in Moore’s eyes dims as she begins to
misidentify or forget her three children, or the layout of her own home. This
cognitive descent is played up further when she delivers prepared remarks at an
Alzheimer’s conference, often repeating words, and bringing the audience to
tears. When she drops her papers, she says she hopes he will forget that moment,
and insists that she soon will. The subtlety of this flickering recall is
reminiscent of Moore’s acting in the fiercely quiet and powerful Far From
Heaven. She’s firmly in control, and though Baldwin is playing an amalgam
of his “Smart Alec” persona as best as he can, this film becomes a master class
showcase of Moore’s creative restraint.
Directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, the film’s brazen focus on
Alice’s anxiety and prevention of mental defeat is a result of their
partnership, and personal adaptation of the 2007 novel. According to the
Hollywood Reporter, Glatzer, who has ALS, co-directed the film using an iPad and
text-to-speech app. The result of their strong partnership? A quiet, understated movie to remember.
http://www.laineygossip.com/Julianne-Moore-in-Still-Alice-TIFF-review/31261
Everything Zoomer
A career performance by Julianne Moore in this stunning portrait
of a 50-year-old professor diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s.
Country: United States
Starring: Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart,
Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish
Directed by: Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland
Genre: Drama
Choice Quote: “It feels like my brain is dying and
everything I ever worked for in life is going.” – Alice
The Hype: The unexpected diagnosis of early onset
Alzheimer’s turns 50-year-old Dr. Alice Howland’s (Moore) life upside down. The
successful linguistics professor struggles through both the inevitable cognitive
decline, and the toll, both physical and emotional, that the disease takes on
her family.
See It At TIFF?: A sincere, dignified, and honest portrait
of the toll Alzheimer’s disease takes on both the patient and those who love
them, Still Alice is without a doubt, Julianne Moore’s most poignant
performance to date.
This isn’t a film that glosses over the realities of the disease. It’s
brutal. It’s unforgiving. It hits hard and, in Alice Howland’s case, fast. And
it doesn’t care if, during your busy day-to-day life, you really don’t have time
for it.
Moore does a beautiful job illustrating the ugly progression of this disease,
beginning with the simple forgetting of words, through not being able to find
the bathroom in her house, to not recognizing her own children. But it’s also
the subtleties of her loss of speech, the way she walks, her body language, the
hollow gaze in her eyes, the plan of action when the disease has gone too far.
After all, Alzheimer’s is so much more than just forgetting things.
Alice, luckily, has a strong family core of support, including her husband
John (Baldwin), who at first refuses to accept the diagnosis, and her children
Anna (Bosworth), Tom (Parrish) and Lydia (Stewart), who struggle with their
mother’s decline in very real, raw, and loving ways.
But this film isn’t just a tearjerker about someone with a terminal illness.
The climactic scene, where Alice heroically fights back against her declining
faculties to deliver an impassioned speech to the Alzheimer’s Association,
epitomizes the core of this film perfectly: it’s not about dying from
Alzheimer’s. It’s about living, as fully as possible, with it.
The Verdict: Grab a box of tissues and get to the theatre to
see Still Alice.
Rating (out of 5): 4.0
http://www.everythingzoomer.com/tiff-2014-review-still-alice/#.VBBzKrvD_IU
The Telegraph
The most intrepid scene in the gorgeous, piercing Still Alice is between
Julianne Moore and herself.
The heroine of Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel is a linguistics professor, Dr Alice
Howland, who must master what the poet Elizabeth Bishop called “the art of
losing”. She’s diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
Alice, who has reached the point of forgetting her children’s names and how
to spell “October”, finds a video file on her laptop. She’s not meant to be
watching it, or not yet: it’s supposed to be the last message she’ll ever see,
when her mind has already deteriorated to a point past endurance. The person
on the video is her earlier self – an Alice soon after diagnosis, in the
controlled infancy of her illness.
On one level, this is a kind of trap Alice has laid, to bring on the end in
the kindest way for her family. But it’s also a missive of caring and love
from a person to her future self. Moore delivers it with consoling patience,
as if addressing a child, and at the same time listens, with a trusting smile
of befuddled self-recognition.
It’s perhaps the centerpiece moment of an astonishingly delicate and sad
performance. To Moore’s precious gallery of portraits – the ailing, lost Carol
White of Safe (1995), the strung-out Amber Waves of Boogie Nights (1997), the
emotionally imprisoned Cathy Whitaker of Far From Heaven (2002) – Alice
Howland must now be added.
Her close-ups are minutely calibrated, even by this actress’s celebrated,
unshowy standards. The increments of the performance are tiny marvels. It’s
these that make the precipitous then-and-now of this iBook face-off shattering
to behold.
The film follows a very straight trajectory into this cruelest of all
neurological disorders – rendered especially cruel when Alice, who has three
children, finds out she has a rare, hereditary kind. There’s no messing around
with fragmentary form, or the memory-as-puzzle-box gimmicks of which cinema
can be over-fond, save for a few flickers of childhood home video footage on
the beach.
Despite an overly insistent chamber-led score, it’s extremely moving in the
gentlest, most linear way, and the other performances are sterling, too.
The bristling impatience of Alec Baldwin’s persona is ideally harnessed as
John, Alice’s husband, whose scoffing denial of her initial diagnosis elicits
lightning rage from his wife – she’s used to him not listening. Kate Bosworth,
as their tightly-wound eldest daughter, and Kristen Stewart, as her sister, do
lovely, complementary work.
Beyond memory loss, it’s a film whose subject is words – their meaning and
function, everything they helplessly give away about the brain and its
rebellions. The first one Alice forgets, at a lecture podium, is “lexicon”.
She goes from a 66-point Words With Friends score, with a well-placed HADJ, to
a shadow of the player she used to be, laying down TONE for a mere 6.
She tests herself, at first, chalking “cathode”, “pomegranate”, “trellis” on
the kitchen board, and setting a timer to see if she can recall them. When
Lydia, months later, recites passages from Angels in America to her mother,
they have become mere sounds, but she’s still able to recognize them as sounds
conveying something to do with love.
Directing here, and doing their best work ever, is the married team of
Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, for whom this project is especially
personal: Glatzer suffers from a related neurodegenerative ailment, ALS, and
was unable to come to this Toronto premiere.
Their film will mean a lot to a lot of people – not just anyone whose life
Alzheimer’s has affected, but anyone whom it could affect, ever. Working with
the magisterial French cameraman Denis Lenoir (Carlos), they get every shot to
take its still, measured toll.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/toronto-film-festival/11087346/Still-Alice-Toronto-Film-Festival-review-magisterial.html