Wordplay: Review of Still Alice

Still Alice

Director: Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland

By Alex Watson


You can only imagine what it must be like to have your mind go into stages of decline. Suddenly the person you were begins to fade away and your life becomes a very different experience. After impressing at TIFF 2014 and earning a overwhelmingly positive response, directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland bring us a heartbreaking adaptation of Lisa Genova's novel Still Alice. With Julianne Moore anchoring this effort could be one of the strongest that 2014 has to offer.

Dr Alice Howlett (Julianne Moore) is a world renowned and respected professor of linguistics at Columbia University. She has a happy marriage to John (Alec Baldwin) and three great children. Soon though she finds herself beginning to forget words and through this she suspects something is wrong. Crushingly Alice is diagnosed with early onset of Alzheimer Disease and soon she has contend with her life falling apart. The weight of her disease will test her relationship with her family as well her job!

Still Alice is a simple yet utterly poignant movie from Westmoreland and Glatzner that grabs at our hearts and rips them clean out. The most pulverizing element is how simply things come about and what starts as Alice forgetting to spell words such as Lexicon and gets lost running on her own campus, things soon develop into something far more serious! The moment the life changing news is given to her, it elicits a variety of reactions, John angrily dismisses the diagnosis where as her children Lydia (Kristen Stewart), Anna (Kate Bosworth) and Tom (Hunter Parrish) range from being acutely concerned to nervously staying clear of events.

The later scenes where's her mind begins to deteriorate are one the strike us the most, the most lucid things become an eternal struggle such as her forgetting where the bathroom is supposed to be, her children's names and going from a master at playing 'Words with Friends' to being unable to spell a single thing. Alice is being reduced to a shadow of her former self and gradually words lose all meaning to her, a key scene shows Lydia reading an extract from Angels in America, all Alice can muster is that is 'about love'. The things she loved so dear have become only sounds and feelings.

A variety of extreme close ups from Westmoreland and Glatzer show the pain and affliction that has become Alice's world. In some sense's she is now stuck in a trap that she cannot be released from. The burden on her family gives the film an increasingly strained feel, particularly as John is continually absent which upsets his wife as he is forever not completely listening. But her steadfastness is cause of celebration as Alice still tries to cling to old person she was. At a Alzheimer convention with the aid of a highlighter, she gives one of this years most tear shedding but triumphant speeches!

However there is also a sense of the clocking being run down on Alice's mind and we worry about what the outcome could potentially be. Early on in the movie, Alice makes a video while still her old self that is to give instructions to herself in the future when she 'can no longer answer the questions'. This is supposed to be the last thing she ever sees, but could also be the one thing that she was never supposed to see! Either way it remains as source of discomfort throughout for viewers and we hope in vain it will not be discovered.

The principle strength of Still Alice comes from a stunning central turn from Julianne Moore. 2014 has been one of Moore's strongest years and this role is very much the cherry on top. Playing with devastating effect, she neatly strips away the layers of Alice as her condition worsens and accurately conveys the hurt involved. This role will rank as one of Julianne's career highs and this could well be the part that carries her to award season glory this year. Alec Baldwin also a key anchor for the movie and his gradually increasing avidity to her declining health serves the well but also causes a minor source of stress.

One of the 2014's best independent efforts, Still Alice is a film that is worthy of its critical praise and with the strength of Julianne Moore, it will ensure that audiences will go away feeling a little numb. Best stock up on those Kleenex boxes, they will be compulsory!