When the story opens, Howland is a nationally celebrated professor of linguistics at Columbia University, New York City's Ivy League school. The first signs of memory trouble seem like minor glitches, such as being unable to come up with the right word while making a presentation which she had delivered to large audiences many times before. Ironically, one of Alice's favorite pastimes is playing the game Words With Friends on her cell phone with her adult daughter, Anna (Kate Bosworth). If finding the perfect word to express her ideas should be in anybody's wheel house, it would be Alice's. Another revealing scene of minor consequence shows her forgetting that, just minutes before, she had already been introduced to her son's girlfriend at a family dinner party.
The next, more serious level of mental glitch occurs when she finds herself lost while jogging in the heart of the Columbia campus. As we end up doing many times throughout the story, we feel Howland's frustration, anxiety, confusion, and later embarrassment, fear and despair, all states of mind expertly facially exhibited by the talented Moore. The jogging episode convinces her to consult with Dr. Benjamin (Stephen Kunken), a matter-of-fact yet gentle neurologist. Initially, Howland hopes to keep her husband, John (Alec Baldwin), a medical doctor, in the dark. In an attempt to replicate tests administered by the neurologist, she writes random single words on a blackboard in her kitchen, covers them up with a paper out of her own and John's sight, and then challenges herself to recall them. Eventually her deteriorating condition manifests itself at an accelerated rate to the point where she has no choice but to advise John of her lamentable diagnosis. There is his expected disbelief, but all doubts are erased with a subsequent joint visit with Dr. Benjamin. At age fifty, Alice has early onset Alzheimer's Disease.
As if things could not get much worse, Alice learns that her sickness is "familial," meaning that not only did she inherit the high probability of contracting Alzheimer's from a parent, but that her children are possibly likewise susceptible to the same malady. The scene where Alice breaks the news to her three adult children, shortly after Anna has happily announced her pregnancy to the family, is something that I've thought about even two days after viewing.
There are other challenges. Youngest daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart), the only one of Alice and John's children who did not attend medical or law school, is a free spirited independent adventurer, who lives in LA in hopes of becoming an actress. Were it not for John's beneficence (initially unbeknownst to Alice), she would be a starving artist. The dialogue between Lydia and Alice, unsuccessfully trying to hide her disappointment in her daughter's career path, is sharp and real. Lydia loves her mother, but is not afraid to tell her, "You can't use your condition to try to control my life." Nevertheless, Stewart is at her best when her character shows verbal restraint versus the inner emotion she would prefer to express.
Another challenge arises when John receives a once-in-a-lifetime offer from Mayo Clinic. Alice is getting more confused by the day even in her familiar NYC surroundings. Uprooting her to Minnesota, away from her two oldest children, seems cruel. Of course, the flip side is that eventually Alice won't know what state she's in, so why shouldn't her husband accept the dream job?
There are a number of things to admire about this film, the superlative performance by Moore being at the top of the list. I liked the way directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland are able to convey the passage of time without the use of on-screen subtitles, such as "Three months later." Their tactic is to use clues like holiday occasions, an advancing pregnancy, or conversational references to things which we know were to have occurred in the past. The early scenes in which Dr. Benjamin asks Alice a series of questions in an attempt to pinpoint a probable cause of her problems are extremely well done, showing that the writers have thoroughly researched their subject.
In spite of these positives, the movie comes across more like a documentary than a fictionalized story. Having witnessed Alzheimer's up close, I can vouch that even a character study of someone victimized by that disease has room for a portion of humor. There is none to be found in Still Alice. That omission surprised me a little, especially after reading a St. Cloud Times account of how Julianne Moore struck a friendship with Sandy Oltz, a fifty year old Sartell, Minnesota early onset patient with whom Moore spent a great deal of time preparing for her role. Oltz came across in the paper as someone with a great sense of humor and a positive outlook on life. Furthermore, Baldwin is a versatile actor with undisputed comic abilities. The opportunity for inclusion of humor was there for the taking, but not utilized. Perhaps showing that lighter side of dealing with an Alzheimer's patient would be too risky, from a political correctness point of view, for the film makers to incorporate. But without the balance of a few funny respites, I found myself drained after witnessing the gradual decline of the leading lady.
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