Still Alice (UK Rating: 12A)
Julianne Moore’s win at this year’s Oscars was no surprise: she had already scooped just about every Best Actress trophy going and there was a general feeling that this was ‘her year.’ For British audiences, who have had to wait until this Friday, 6th March, to see her performance in Still Alice, it means the film’s had more of a build-up than would usually be the case for a comparatively small movie. It’s also given Moore a chance to talk extensively about the subject of the film, Alzheimer’s disease.
Not that Still Alice is the first film on the subject, though. After all, there was Iris (2001) and Away from Her (2006), but Still Alice comes at a time when dementia is never far away from the headlines and awareness is growing, so it certainly has the highest profile.
The storyline is already familiar: Moore plays a linguistics professor, diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s just after her fiftieth birthday. The condition develops quickly, so she’s soon unable to work and has to set herself a daily test, a series of essential questions she needs to be able to answer. She also prepares for the future by leaving herself a video message about what to do on the day that she can’t answer those questions. However, she’s recorded it while she can still think clearly and has no idea of what she will be like as her condition develops. Then her husband John (Alec Baldwin) decides to take a new job, so her youngest daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart) becomes her full-time carer.
While there was some debate about the quality of this year’s Best Actress contenders at the Oscars, there’s no doubt that Moore was a worthy winner. Her performance is luminous, full of compassion and subtlety, and totally devoid of sentimentality. Most impressive of all is her physical deterioration, which creeps up so gradually that neither she nor the audience notice – until the scene where she watches her own video message. It’s a transformation achieved purely through Moore’s acting and minimal make up and nothing more than that. Saying that, she doesn’t have it all her own way, because there’s quietly impressive support from Kirsten Stewart as her youngest daughter, the headstrong would-be actress who puts her career on hold to look after her mother, something the rest of the family seems reluctant to do. It’s an honest, sensitive performance and a real eye-opener.
Such a strong central performance needs an equally strong film to carry it, but with Still Alice it’s Moore that’s carrying the film. Without her, it would disappear down a black hole in the middle. With the exception of Stewart, the rest of the characters are much less developed but, more importantly, the film dodges the tougher aspects of Alice’s condition. The audience is given lots of information about the disease, courtesy of her neurologist, but only gets glimpses of its physical reality, and Alice is a very compliant patient, so there’s only the occasional panic in the night – she doesn’t wander off, have accidents, or get angry with her confusion. Plus the family isn’t exactly short of a bob or two, so she gets the very best medical care. Not everybody is so lucky. It would have been a very different story if they had been on Medicare, or a UK family using the NHS, and it would probably have been a more realistic, challenging movie.
