 |
| Julianne Moore might fittingly win her first Oscar for her towering Still Alice performance /Indiewire |
There’s
a moment late in Still Alice, Wash
Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer’s devastating portrait of a middle-aged woman contending
with Alzheimer ’s disease, that startlingly clarifies the brilliance of its
lead performance. Julianne Moore’s Alice Howland, by this point struggling
mightily with her sense of place and time, has come across a video of her
former self – and for the viewer, it’s a jarring experience. Moore so subtly,
so gently and so humanely guides her character through the disease that, until
this moment, you don’t realize just how much has been lost. Alice is, well,
still Alice – only, as the scene’s sharp contrast demonstrates, she’s really
not.
Still Alice
is a tender, quiet, small-scale film that features – if I may be so bold – the
year’s very best piece of acting. And for a performer like Moore, whose onscreen
creations range from the beloved (Far
From Heaven) to the indelible (Boogie
Nights) to the underrated (last year’s What
Maisie Knew, among many, many others), my impulse to call this a career-best
effort is quelled by her astonishing resume – I’ll have to sit on the temptation
for now. The movie’s ambitious conceit is to completely center the film on Alice
– even as her day-to-day is eventually themed by remembering a family member,
or finding the right word – and it’s a daunting task for any actor. The film
lives and dies on its star’s performance – and Moore, who conveys a bristling
intelligence and maintains a shaky dignity, surpasses every expectation.
Thus,
Westmoreland and Glatzer translate a work that is very difficult to watch: this
is a wrenchingly sad and unrelenting film. But although they evoke their
intended emotional journey, Still Alice
lands frustratingly flat. The filmmakers’ choices are rigid and obvious, from timely blurrings of the screen (everything seems obscured!) to the extremity of the Howland’s bourgeois
lifestyle (brunches are aplenty here), and it’s often awkward considering the humane performance at its
center, and the smallness of the film itself. One gets a sense that there’s an
attempt at elevated artistry here, but the directorial effort on display is
quite safe. “Safe” is not inherently bad, and it would suit Still Alice to simply be, without a
grander idea muffling its emotional impact. When ideas don’t get in the way,
there’s a fluidity with the camera, agreeably naturalistic dialogue and a cast
of strong actors handling the material successfully. The structural and
cinematic simplicity of Still Alice
is appropriate for the material; the same cannot be said for when Westmoreland
and Glatzer try to do more.
The
script is sketched out with a series of motifs. Alice likes to play Words with
Friends; as the disease worsens, she obviously cannot. Alice likes to go
running; over time, her sense of place fades, and it becomes an unrealistic
activity. Alice is also a distinguished linguistic professor – she is, as she describes
herself to her daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart), “defined by her intellect” –
which is the first, and therefore the most difficult, part of herself to let go
of. What defines Alice, like all of us, is what the disease takes away – her
ability to communicate, to work a profession, to be a spouse, to be a parent –
with the exception of a significant caveat. By the film’s conclusion, Alice has
all but lost the ability to speak – but when Lydia reads her the affecting
final monologue of Angels in America,
Alice can connect to it. She is reactive, and she smiles, and she rightly
mouths to her daughter exactly why: “Love.”
Westmoreland
and Glatzer also wrote the script, and in that regard, the film fares better.
Whether it’s Alec Baldwin as husband John, or Hunter Parrish as son Tom, or
Stewart in one of her better performances, Alice’s interactions with her family
are loosely realized, softly infused with humor and pain and deep connection. Still Alice is duly reliant on
relatability, and necessarily, its parental and spousal relationships are richly
authentic. More impressive is the delicate handling of Alice’s speaking
patterns – I described Moore’s thoroughness in chronicling the progression of
Alzheimer’s, but sufficient credit must also go to the writing for tracking it
so precisely. In general, Still Alice
maintains an admirable realism.
The
primary weakness here is that more often than not, there’s no texturing to the
film. In a downright perfect scene late into the film, John takes Alice out for
frozen yogurt. She doesn’t remember her favorite flavor. When he sees Columbia
University – where Alice taught – he points it out, and she doesn’t recognize
it, can’t remember even a day she spent there. The scene progresses with a merciless
ordinariness, and John’s inability to see his once-thriving wife like this
finally leads to an unbearably sad question: “Do you even want to be here,
Alice?” She doesn’t understand the question, but the tears in his eyes and the
shakiness of his voice expresses a bone-deep pain and helplessness. This was
effective, and yet, in the film's previous thirty minutes, John is a
near-supervillain, wishing to take Alice to Minnesota so he can accept a new
job opportunity without regard for her fragile state. He’s cold and distant –
there’s no indication of his mindset until this moment with his wife, a shift
that feels less thematically potent than cheap and rushed. Westmoreland and Glatzer’s idea
to keep characters around Alice peripheral doesn’t really work, as this tonal
mistake indicates. The complexity of the relationships between Alice and her
loved ones is given the short shrift; and so, good as a scene like this with
Baldwin is, it only teases the depth that the film fails to mine.
And
this is the general problem with Alice;
its final image, for instance, implies that this was a story chiefly about a
mother finding common ground with Lydia. But there just isn’t enough
there. Stewart ably shades Lydia, but the same cannot be said for the work of
Parrish or Kate Bosworth as Alice’s eldest daughter Anna. Tom is the ideal
doctor son, Anna the sharp if somewhat controlling daughter. These actors
fail to make an impression because there’s nothing on the page – they don’t
ring false, as previously noted, but there’s a hollowness surrounding Alice
that’s all the more apparent as the film drowns in sorrow. This may be
intentional – but if so, there’s a narrative about a distant family and the
futility of bloodline relationships that doesn’t get dealt with. It just sort
of floats over the story in front of us, maddeningly present yet unable to make
an actual impression.
That
pretty much sums up the viewing experience here. Still Alice feels like a collection of half-baked ideas – visual
and narrative – about parental shaping, our connection to words and language, and the unending
pain that comes with love. And the film works in its openness and seriousness,
in treating the disease with grim honesty while retaining the victim’s
humanity. But it doesn’t come together. Even if it has a lot on its mind, from
page to screen nothing is effectively or meaningfully communicated. In the end,
Still Alice lives up to its tearjerker
expectations, but in no way matches the work of art that is the performance at
its center.