Poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote that "the art of losing isn't hard to master." The title character of "Still Alice" suggests otherwise — shakily reciting this poem in front of her children and fighting to say the words before they fade from her memory, which is rapidly deteriorating from Alzheimer's disease.
Can something like loss, which we would not willingly explore, truly be mastered? More often, it's imposed upon us. Anyone who has seen a parent's larger-than-life spirit shrunken by sickness likely won't want to watch "Still Alice." However, if they do, it will engage them in the way the best art does — shaking them from their comfort zone but ultimately making them feel less alone.
Based on the book by Lisa Genova and written/directed by filmmaking couple Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland ("The Last of Robin Hood"), "Still Alice" is a challenging yet compelling film. It casts a subdued cinematic light on a terrible disease without softening its devastating effects.
Julianne Moore stars as Alice Howland, a Columbia University linguistics professor who finds her sharp mind dulling on the heels of her 50th birthday. Early on, she seems to simply be experiencing side effects of middle age, forgetting words now and then and losing her train of thought in the middle of a lecture. But then she finds herself lost while jogging along her usual route on the streets of New York. It's an unsettling, otherworldly scene, visualizing Alice's fading sense of direction with a hazy foreground, blurring the faces of passersby. In her mind, Alice doesn't live in this city or know who she is. She's soon diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's.
Each member of her family essentially embodies a different stage of grief. Her husband, John (Alec Baldwin), represents the impatience and irritation people struggle to suppress when caring for a sick loved one. "It’s the middle of the night," he yells at Alice as she tears up their kitchen looking for her cell phone.
While Alice is losing her identity, her daughters are trying to find their own. The eldest, Anna (Kate Bosworth), fights off the pain by focusing on her husband and having children. The youngest, Lydia (Kristen Stewart) seems to be more understanding and accepting of her mother's illness — perhaps because she also loses her identity every day as an actress, operating within another mind while trying to keep her heart intact.
Glatzer and Westmoreland explore Alice's life with a subtle yet immersive sense of style. First, the film's chronology is fuzzy. Days blend into months, as they would in the mind of an Alzheimer's patient. We see Alice's deterioration from a distance — watching like flies on a wall as her world crumbles. When Alice tells Lydia how she feels, the camera doesn't close in on Moore, and composer Ilan Eshkeri doesn't manipulate us with melodramatic music. Even in the more nightmarish, cinematic sequences — like the one in which Alice forgets where the bathroom is in her beach house — the ominous violin trills emerge organically, pulsating like heart palpitations.
"Still Alice" is ultimately anchored by Moore's unflinching portrayal of a woman stricken with the worst kind of panic — not recognizing the world around her and, worse yet, herself. In her eyes looms a gathering storm, a sense of impending doom, the weight of not knowing what she will lose next.
Compassion courses through every scene of the film, as if it were made by someone suffering from an illness. In fact, Glatzer was diagnosed with ALS when he and Westmoreland set out to write "Still Alice." By the time production started, he could communicate only by typing with his toes on a specially adapted iPad. He used it to direct on the set every day during the making of the movie. This was undoubtedly a hard, harrowing journey but one well worth experiencing — like the film itself.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrXrZ5iiR0o&w=560&h=315]