Still Alice packs serious emotional punch


There are not enough tissues in the world’s largest allergy clinic to last you through Still Alice, a film based on The New York Times best selling novel of the same name by Lisa Genova. Directed by Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer, Still Alice transcends its tissue-level sadness to tell a story that is as inspiring as it is heart wrenching.

Dr. Alice Howland is a linguistics professor at Columbia who has built a reputation as one of the top academics in her field. Around that, she has built a loving family with her husband John and her three children, Lydia, Anna and Tom. Then, Alice starts to forget words. She gets lost running home one day. As her lapses grow, she sees a neurologist who diagnoses her with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

What Ronald Reagan famously described as the “journey that will take me into the sunset of my life” is anything but sunny for Alice, who faces a struggle to preserve her former self. As Alice (brilliantly played by Julianne Moore) begins to lose everything she spent her entire life working for, her husband (Alec Baldwin) and three children struggle to remember their mother for the woman she once was, not the woman she is becoming. The film’s storytelling is crystal clear. It powerfully zeroes in on Alzheimer’s impact on the everyday routines of those it effects.

The family’s bonds are tested. For years, Alice disagreed with the decision of her youngest child Lydia (Kristen Stewart) to become an actress and forego the college life pursued by her two older siblings. As Lydia watches her mother become a shadow, their disagreement pales in comparison to Lydia’s desire to grow closer to her mother before it’s too late. Alice’s husband John, a renowned medical doctor played by the perennially creepy-voiced Alec Baldwin, is forced to continue his high-level career and caring for his wife in her terminal stages.

Still Alice is not just a film about a dying woman. The films’ score and cinematography paint a comprehensive, complex and visually real picture of the terrifying toll Alzheimer’s takes on Alice and her family. At one point, she laments the less-than sexy nature of her disease in popular culture, comparing it to the large fundraisers and media attention devoted to other terminal illnesses like cancer.

Still Alice is an authentic reminder to appreciate life and find meaning in adversity, a message known all too well by directors and husbands Westmoreland and Glatzer. The couple were thrown into the same struggle as Alice when Glatzer was diagnosed with ALS in 2011, and their insight into the battle with a terminal illness unquestionably lends the film insight that is irreplaceable.

In a beautiful way, that personal experience allows Still Alice to never come across as a tired cliche film preaching to “live every day like its your last.” Instead, it will leave you with a deeper respect for memory and family, things taken for granted far too often. If you leave without this deeper respect, you might have seen a different movie.

The struggle depicted would also not be nearly as powerful without the genius brought forth by Julianne Moore. Moore received the Golden Globe for best actress in a major motion picture and is a favorite to receive the Academy Award in the same category, an award she deserves as much as anyone in the field. Her insight into Alice’s simultaneous brilliance as a professor and vulnerability as Alzheimer’s robs her of that brilliance is breathtaking. Moore’s ability to communicate that insight? Even more incredible. In Still Alice, Moore delivers one of the most complex performances an actress could ever be tasked with, and delivers it masterfully.

While you would be remiss to forget the tissues at home, you would be even more remiss to not see Still Alice. One of the most emotionally gripping films of the year, it will forever occupy a high place in the genre of films dedicated to celebrating life and the struggles it presents.