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| Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart (Sony Pictures Classics) |
Still Alice is one of those movies I could endlessly criticize and endlessly praise. Julianne Moore is heart-breaking as Alice, a linguistics professor at Colombia who begins to show symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. She prided herself on her ability to think and reason, on her illustrious New York lifestyle and her well-to-do children (except for the moody Kristin Stewart, of course) and now must confront the inevitable reality of losing control of her brain. Directors Glatzer and Westmoreland really love their Julianne and capture every bit of nuance from her extravagant, masterful performance. These are, unfortunately, inferior directors whose vision begins and ends with the performance. Not to disparage the movie – its transcendent moments are truly the finest pieces of acting I’ve seen all year. But the plot is surprisingly straightforward – she’s diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and the movie quite literally chronicles her decline. It is the most uncompromising approach to illness I’ve ever seen – whether this is a good thing, however, I’m not entirely sure.
The movie’s highlight is the speech she gives at the Alzheimer’s convention. Here’s a woman, a lecturer in a past life, attempting to craft a well-articulated scientific speech about her disease. “Try to talk about your own experiences,” her daughter Lydia suggests to her before in a Skype practice. Her original language - riddled with obtuse scientific words and phrases – is thin and unconvincing. Her audience no longer consists of students, after all – these are people like her, struggling to be part of life’s daily routine.
Alice – already in the worst stages of the disease – is agitated with the criticism and hangs up. When she stands on that stage, however, she seems to have taken the advice; here she is, talking about what it means for her to live with such an illness, her struggles finding a niche in a society that’s leaving her behind. As she says quite powerfully, she can only accept herself at each moment and nothing more. It’s not an arc Alice gets to, not a moment of cathartic realization. We’re watching a woman who must survive differently everyday.
This movie does a good job of not relying to heavily on narrative to highlight the random brutality of Alzheimer’s disease, an illness with no beginning and no end. The directors effortlessly present us a cunning Alice before the disease encroached and a confused Alice watching confusedly, two diametrically opposed selves fighting for control in their own ways. That transition is well-done, the culmination to that moment well-paced.
But it’s because of Moore’s ability to create a character both internally and externally and to communicate through an expression or line-delivery where the disease has her now, that a moment like that can work. But the performance is limited insofar as she has no one to really play off of – the filmmakers lock her up in solitary confinement and keep you there, thinking that they’re doing her a service, while in fact inhibiting our ability to understand who Alice is. An argument can be made that this isn’t important, but the filmmakers are interested in her family. Given the amount of time we spend with them, the supporting characters (including Baldwin, despite the great Pinkberry scene) feel too peripheral.
A film dealing with this disease is tricky to balance. On the one hand, you want to capture Alice’s mental dystrophy in the way you shoot her surroundings and characterize her relationships. But the canvas is too claustrophobic and tone-deaf which, considering the quality of acting, does Moore’s performance a disservice. The cuts were too disorienting and too jarring to situate you comfortably in any scene. It felt like a pastiche of scenes which might have been really fun and wonderful to create in the moment, but which really felt like disjointed parts. My problem isn’t with anything in particular – I struggle to believe that the responsibility of criticism is to reflect what you may have wanted to the movie to be and to suggest how the movie may have been better. Except for the irritating amateur editing and shoddy camera-work, Still Alice’s flaws probably are the result of a script that worked in theory.
An adaptation of Lisa Genova’s hit novel, the screenplay compartmentalizes Alice’s story quite effectively. It is straight-forward, has a clear end-point and communicates the harsh realities of dealing with random tragedy. It is uncompromising and it’s unfair to characterize the writing as melodramatic as many critics have done. The writer/directors pigeonholed themselves by focusing too much on Alice Howland. It’s cute, if you think about it. They just love Julianne! If you were directing Still Alice, anything but Julianne might have just seemed less interesting. But the problem with that choice is that nothing else could come into focus; the performance these directors so adored and admired, a performance which they clearly poured a lot of energy into, was ultimately existing in an inconsistent reality. Few directors can deal with the aesthetic pitfalls of Alzheimer’s. Losing memory is experiential and cinematic, requiring masterful handling to be truly successfu. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind unearthed the aesthetic possibilities of cinema’s relationship to the mind. Memento, Muholland Drive, Amour all bend the mind/body vortex well.
I have a strange sympathy with the filmmakers: this is the-little-movie-that-could, a film made on $4 million budget, with one of the directors struggling currently with ALS. The movie comes from a place of love and passion, but the filmmakers unfortunately were too ambitious in their aesthetic undertaking. The directors worked from the inside-out, whereas Moore was working from the outside-in. That’s the only way to justify such lack-luster construction: they tried making us feel what Moore’s character was going through, but succeeded mostly in pretty standard moments which didn’t require such a claustrophobic eye.
And yet, they didn’t fail. Because at the end of the movie, your bereft, exhausted and left hopeless. A harsh reality is presented. Never in Hollywood films do you find such an uncompromising approach to tragedy, so insistent on its harsh reality, so comprehensive in its handling of such an unfair disease. If Amour and Away From Her were tough and sad, Still Alice is grueling. What an odd movie. So many mistakes and flaws, yet it gave us the best performance I’ve seen all year, the best performance I’ve ever seen Julianne Moore give. Despite the overall Lifetime movie feel, that has to count for something.
Grade: C+ / B-
Check out David's review here.