Aubrey Malone
Still Alice (12A)
When Judi Dench played Iris Murdoch in the throes of Alzheimer’s disease in Iris, I was blown away. Likewise when Julie Christie essayed a similar role in Away from Her. But Julianne Moore tops them all with her Oscar-winning performance in this intensely moving adaptation of Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel which is co-directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland.
When Christopher Reeve became paralysed from the neck down after an equestrian accident in the mid-1990s, his wife Dana said to him: “You’re still you.” Reeve called his subsequent autobiography Still Me. The point is continued in the title of this fine film. Another way of putting it might be, ‘Alice might have Alzheimer’s disease but Alzheimer’s disease doesn’t have Alice’.
Moore plays Alice Howland, a renowned linguistics professor at Columbia University with three grown children: Tom (Hunter Parrish), Anna (Kate Bosworth) and her youngest, Lydia (Kristen Stewart), an aspiring actress. Her husband John (Alec Baldwin) is a senior research physician. It’s a family that has it all. Or does it?
She’s only 50 when the symptoms of Alzheimers begin to appear during an exclusive lecture, the disease being no respecter of reputations. Later on she becomes lost during a jog in Manhattan. When her neurologist diagnoses early on-set Alzheimers, she’s devastated. She chillingly tells Baldwin, “I wish I had cancer”.
As well as being about herself, the film deals with the reactions of her family.
Baldwin throws himself into his work to try and deal with the trauma of his beloved wife slipping away from him. Now the sole breadwinner, he contemplates a job offer in another state. Former black sheep of the family Lydia grows closer to Alice, their dependency roles now reversed from before.
This is a very poignant film that resists any opportunity to milk the situation or over-dramatise it. It’s in Moore’s quiet moments that we witness the great trauma of her predicament. She’s so much ‘in’ the role it’s difficult at times to believe she’s acting. It’s the crowning achievement of a glittering career.
In the year in which Eddie Redmayne shared Oscar glory with Moore for playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, it’s amazing to learn that Glatzer, the film’s co-director, suffers from a similar condition to Hawking – a form of motor neurone disease that has taken away his ability to speak. He communicated with his cast by typing directions on an iPad with his right toe.
This is a must-see film, a tour de force for all concerned that will reduce you to tears as well as giving you empathy with a terrifying condition that affects so many around the world as researchers struggle valiantly for a cure.
Excellent *****
