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Wednesday, January 28, 2015

MOVIE REVIEW Still Alice
A Disease With No Cure, And The Ensuing Wilderness



Julianne Moore as Dr. Alice Howland in "Still Alice", a drama written and directed by Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer.
  Sony Pictures Classics
       

by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Wednesday, January 28, 2015

The face of linguistic professor Dr. Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is what we first see in "Still Alice".  Alice is celebrating her 50th birthday with her family at a swanky New York City restaurant in this quiet, mannered Lifetime TV-type cable movie of the week.  That's not to denigrate the drama by Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer.  Their spare, obvious approach works strictly for Ms. Moore and her onscreen character rather than "Still Alice" itself, a serious, matter-of-fact film that pulls at your heartstrings emphatically and irritatingly via Ilan Eshkeri's maudlin score.

Alice's face, and the lighting the filmmakers give it, is a key to whether "Still Alice" works cinematically as a film about her early-onset Alzheimer's, an increasingly common affliction.  (Alice's situation, however, is rare, because she can pass her condition on to her three children genetically.)  The disease Alice has is represented in a study of facial erasure and a collapse of an actresses' "vanity".  Ms. Moore, never one to play to any notion of vanity (see phobia - "Safe"; deprivation - "Blindness"), gives a moving, affecting performance as Alice, a doctor struggling to hold onto the world around her while she can still remember it.  Soon Alice's rosy face will be bare.  Stark.  Pallid.  Colors in her world and the film's will fade.  Lights will brighten.  The film's total architecture will blur into an intense white nothingness. 

Ms. Moore fills the spaces of Alice's barren's world with large, open pauses, slower speech, angular movements and a bravery and skill that the film's small spaces take full advantage of.  It's a large effort, and Ms. Moore expertly carries this film on her back.  Alice's vulnerability is intellectualized in stages of forgetfulness.  Names, faces, places.  Remembering an address.  Ms. Moore is careful to stay within the contours of a vibrant youthful professor while developing the skin for a second, new self.  She does it all so subtly and at once, to such a degree you don't necessarily know exactly when her decline first occurred.

We're enveloped in Alice's shaky world as she slowly then rapidly loses her cognitive abilities.  Many shots of Ms. Moore introduced into the frame are from behind, in standard full-body shots.  We inevitably look at the back of her head.  The framing from behind is a clever way to create the distance Alice has traveled from the events of the film's opening scene, as well as a marking of state of mind and array of perspectives of Alice in a spatial way.  There's perspectives of Ms. Moore that are truncated; profile shots.  At one point of entry she's centered in the frame.  In another scene she is positioned on the right side of it.  Each scene is a stage of disintegration.  An off-kilter stage: the lecture at a campus.  Or a jog through New York City's Central Park to Columbia University.  Or a walk on the Columbia campus where Alice teaches. 

"Still Alice", designed from the jump as a genuine tearjerker, is a small, independent film with dual layers: the first is of a woman coping with Alzheimer's.  The second is of Alice existing in a male world where men doubt or take her less seriously.  Her husband John (Alec Baldwin) dismisses Alice and her feelings when she tells him she fears the worst.  "You'll be okay," he says.  We see John's fear and evasion.  Meanwhile, Alice's male boss at Columbia doubts her ability to perform her professorial tasks.  Early on, a male professor, says he's sparred with Alice in the past on their field of discipline, patronizes her in front of a classroom full of students: "Alice was right." 

In "Still Alice" male skepticism and inherent patriarchy counters Alice's fears and stifle her ability to operate, as does the disease itself.  Sometimes it may be hard to discern who or what is more damaging to Alice, since she gains little initial understanding or empathy anywhere, except from the male doctor who diagnoses her.  John's sometimes breezy, pat reactions to Alice could be borne of conceits the film leaves open-ended -- the possibility of an extra-marital affair -- since an opportunity later sees John having to make a crucial decision.

The directors craft a sensual and sensitive atmosphere.  We see books.  Laptops.  Jewelry.  And iPhones.  We see close ups of these everyday effects -- ones we're familiar with and often cannot do without in our daily lives.  These effects are a way to bring us closer to Alice thorough an albeit purely materialistic convention.  Yet in a somewhat crude way this assemblage of familiar objects works.  If we can't use the instruments we depend on daily -- or worse yet, if we don't remember how -- then in this crazy info-tech world we're as lost as Alice. 

But there's still an undeniable difference: most of us aren't doomed the way Alice is.  The everyday items glimpsed up close are, in the same breath, a false registering and identification through which to empathize with Alzheimer's suffering but Ms. Moore's fine work, especially in a haunting scene with a laptop, obliterates the canned, cloying attempt to tug at you in a film full of formulaic trappings.

The undisputable heart of "Still Alice" though, is Alice's relationship with her 20-something California-based daughter Lydia (an authentic rendering by Kristen Stewart), who wants to go into acting.  "I'm your mother!," Alice says during a moment where she tries to discourage her daughter from pursuing Hollywood.  The relationship isn't clichéd but the parameters it arises in are.  Ms. Moore's Alice is tied to her own mother but much of that story is submerged until the film's final third. 

Alice is more of a compelling advertisement for early onset Alzheimer's than a fully-realized self.  The context of depicting illness is a tough dance that films taking on afflictions have to navigate: how to present its struggling characters without making them overly symbolic and submerged in pitying scenarios.  The trouble with "Still Alice", based on Lisa Genova's book, is that the film's styles, music and scenes overplay Alice, confining her more to a genre of "disease" than it needs to.  Despite Ms. Moore's heroic work the film overall traps her in a corner.  While Mr. Westmoreland and Mr. Glatzer are sincere, committed messengers for a very important cause and awareness, "Still Alice" lays on its atmosphere a little too thick.


Also with: Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish, Stephen Kunken, Shane McCrae, Seth Gillam, Erin Drake.

"Still Alice" is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for mature thematic material, and brief language including a sexual reference.  Its running time is one hour and 41 minutes.

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