Still Alice scrupulously avoids sensationalism of any kind, which results in a beautifully-rendered portrait of the progress of early onset Alzheimer's. Julianne Moore gives a towering performance.
Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University, a seemingly healthy woman of fifty, with a loving, attentive husband, two daughters and a son. She is ambitious, clever, yet humane enough to have us on side from the get-go. One day on the university campus, she finds herself suddenly plunged into a cloud of disorientation, the beginning of her realisation that things are not right.
Already, there had been a sudden faltering during a guest lecture, a moment of icy silence during which you feel - or should that be 'freeze'? - for Alice, as she tries to engage with what should be the next word. So powerful is Moore’s performance, that this is just one of many scenes that linger on. So she goes to see a neurologist who puts her through various word/memory tests, and eventually early onset Alzheimer's is diagnosed. Alice decides not to tell her family and pretty much gets away with it for a while.
The terror of her discovery that everything she has built for herself will slip away is thereafter played against precious times recalled through old photographs and home movie footage.
Still Alice scrupulously renders Alice’s experience as faithfully as possible, with no melodramatics and Alec Baldwin as her husband John is an impressive presence in the film. Kristen Stewart plays the strong-willed daughter, Lydia, whose ongoing tensions with her mother only serve to underline an intimacy which deepens as the illness progresses. Go see Still Alice.
4/5
Paddy Kehoe
There will be a panel discussion featuring voices of advocates living with dementia on Saturday March 7, following the 3.45 screening of Still Alice at the IFI.
