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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
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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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