STILL ALICE
Sony Pictures Classics
Reviewed for Shockya by Harvey Karten. Data-based on Rotten Tomatoes.
Grade: B
Director: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland
Screenwriter: Richard Glatzer, Wash Wesmoreland, from Lisa Genova’s book
Cast: Julianne Moore, Kristen Stewart, Alec Baldwin, Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish
Screened at: Sony, NYC, 11/7/14
Opens: January 16, 2015
As they say, old age is better than the alternative. Still, young people have an inordinate fear of going gray but really, it’s not as bad as they think. Sure, you won’t be able to play even junior-high level football at age 60 and after 40, forget full-court basketball. And the longer you live, the more chance some disease or other will catch up to you. The most dreaded might be Alzheimer’s, which, though not painful like cancer or slowly causing paralysis like Lou Gehrig’s, is always fatal—if you’re lucky you’ll survive seven years—and causes the individual to lose all sense of identity.
Alzheimer’s is especially tragic when it affects a vital, intelligent person at a young age. Just after celebrating her fiftieth birthday with her husband Dr. John Howland (Alec Baldwin), her two daughters Lydia (Kristen Stewart) and Anna (Kate Bosworth), and her son Tom (Hunter Parrish), Alice Howland Ph.D. (Julianne Moore) and Columbia professor of linguistics discovers that she can’t summon up certain words. Her student evaluations are negative, complaining that her lecture are confusing. Her chairman dismisses her from the university when he discovers that she has been diagnosed with early onset familial Alzheimer’s by her neurologist, Dr. Benjamin (Stephen Kunken). She has a particularly fast-developing form of the disease that will take her from her world-famous stature in her field of linguistics to a person who cannot tie her own shoes and loses her ability to form sentences.
While some might dismiss the story as a disease-of-the-week feature, directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland keep the tone dignified, avoiding melodrama save for a single instance in which Alice, unable to locate her cell phone, screams at her husband in desperation.
Julianne Moore, who has previous performed a role of an unexceptional homemaker who develops multiple chemical sensitivity on Todd Haynes’ “Safe,” lends dignity to the role of an intelligent person who is losing it, her terror ever more poignant because the disease drops her from the heights of scholarly fame to such depths that she appears to disappear into herself. The idea for this tale must have hit home for co-director Richard Glatzer suffers from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).
The film was adapted from neuroscientist Lisa Genova’s book of the same name, while directors Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland changed the location from Harvard to Columbia. The film is reminiscent of “A Beatiful Mind” and “Ordinary People” and also of the novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.”
Rated R. 101 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – B
Acting – A-
Technical – B+
Overall – B
