A frightening, depressing walk-through with a patient with Alzheimer's, more so when the patient is as young as 50-year-old Alice (Julianne Moore).
Linguistics professor at Columbia University Alice Howland is diagnosed with early onset familial Alzheimer's, and we experience how she goes through not just the harrowing symptoms of the disease, but the pain of losing what forms her self-identity: her intellect.
We are, however, relieved and comforted by the love, support, and empathy of her strong and stable husband John (Alec Baldwin), who is also her colleague, and her loving and emphatic children Anna (Kate Bosworth), Tom (Hunter Parrish), and the blacksheep of the family, the unshampooed Lydia (Kristen Stewart).
Based on Lisa Genova's self-published novel, Still Alice is deeply heartbreaking and horrifying because the antagonist is a very real degenerative disease, and knowing that it's a devastatingly hopeless case, we painfully sit through its advancement.
Written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, and co-written with Genova, Still Alice has, unfortunately, the TV-movie kind of treatment, barely artful, and utilizing a heavily dramatic score just to drill the pain deeper into your heart.
The straightforward screenplay, though, is what saves the film. It effectively illustrates the scary progression of the disease. And, of course, there's the ever-competent Julianne Moore. This year's Oscar-nominated actress provides an effortlessly natural performance that you forget the actor; instead, you suffer with a patient who reminds us that we do not own anything in this life, even our intellect and sense of self, or things that we work hard for... that we all suffer through our own forms of tragedy.
Brace yourself for a deeply troubling and sad experience.
3 out of 5 stars
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