Sometimes, you just want to get things over with. This thought came to me after finishing Still Alice, the film for which Julianne Moore won an Academy Award on her fifth nomination. Moore felt overdue for a win, especially given that she is the rare person to receive a Lead and Supporting nomination in the same year (2003). Still Alice is fine, I suppose. That, however, may be the problem. It is fine. It is not good.
Dr. Alice Howland (Moore) is a brilliant linguistics professor at Columbia University. She has just turned fifty and is approaching the zenith of her academic career. Alice is happily married to her husband John (Alec Baldwin) a successful surgeon. She also has three children: Anna (Kate Bosworth), Tom (Hunter Parrish) and Lydia (Kristen Stewart). Lydia is the one causing Alice something of a headache, her acting aspirations at odds with Alice's ideas of success.
One day, Alice struggles through a presentation. She jokingly plays it off as the aftereffects of too much wine. However, other troubling elements start emerging. She gets lost jogging in familiar areas. She forgets more words. She confuses her daughter for her sister. What is the matter with Alice?
It is not a brain tumor, as she initially suspects. It is early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Alice takes the news surprisingly well, showing no emotion to the diagnosis. She also starts slipping further into the disease. She greets a guest twice, unaware that they have met at the most a half-hour prior. She forgets dinner dates and meetings. She gets lost more often. Alice will not let the disease defeat her, though it does inevitably cost her the loss of her job.
She starts speaking publicly about her diagnosis, requiring a marker to note what she has previously said. It is time for the Howland family to make tough decision. Will John decline an offer from the Mayo Institute to keep Alice in familiar territory? Will Alice and Lydia reconcile their differences? Will Lydia put aside her own acting dreams to care for her mother? Will Alice make a difficult choice about her life if she finds that she can no longer care for herself?
I imagine that Alzheimer's disease is an extremely difficult diagnosis, not just for the person afflicted but also for that person's family. It is painful to see someone fade out into a shadow world, unable to help your loved one in any way. It is painful too to know that you are doomed to fade out yourself, condemned to losing your very identity and ability to function. Each person handles these things differently: denial, anger, sadness.
What did surprise me about Still Alice is an emotion that I did not expect: dispassion. I suppose that I can give co-directors/writers Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland credit. They opted to not make Still Alice into a sensational or overly sentimental adaptation of Lisa Genova's novel. They did not give the actors big moments of emotional outbursts or histrionics. Instead, I think that they went the opposite way and made the whole thing rather cold and remote.
It is one thing to be eerily calm when you are given an Alzheimer's diagnosis. It is, I find, quite another to be almost disengaged when you are told that it might be a brain tumor. Alice as played by Moore at times never seemed to display any emotion. I found this surprising given that the character was, I presume, meant to be seen as intellectual and strong.
I can concede that perhaps that was how Alice Howland was supposed to be: disengaged, remote, dispassionate about her declining health. However, I found her too remote, removed and almost inhuman. To be fair, she did display a little prickliness when dealing with her doctor. That prickliness seemed more for his own calm manner than from any struggle she had.
There were times when I thought that Alice was using Alzheimer's as an excuse to get out of things like dinners that she was not keen on. It is strange that what I figure was meant as an emotionally devasting scene where she cries because she can't find the restroom, I thought that it was veering towards parody.
Her insistence on continuing to try and teach despite her growing inability to do so did not come across as courageous. It came across as arrogant. For someone who is meant to be highly intelligent, she came across as stupid in not seeing that her class was a muddle.
The rest of the cast save one made Still Alice, well, still in their actions. I found very little emotion in every actor except Kristen Stewart. Again, I was not looking for big moments where people throw things and go into shouting tirades. I was also not expecting the exact opposite: no emotion, no reaction to what I figure would be a difficult thing to live through.
Stewart, as noted, was the exception. That, however, is not a good thing. She played a struggling actress. I saw an actress struggling. I have never thought that Kristen Stewart is a good actress. Still Alice did not convince me to change my mind.
One of Still Alice's greatest flaws is Ilan Eshkeri's score, which was syrupy and getting on my nerves. Perhaps Eshkeri's score was meant to make up for the lack of emotion that the characters had. That's as good a guess as to why I found it unbearable to listen to.
None of this is to say that the attention that Still Alice brings to Alzheimer's disease is not a good thing. Alice in her speech to an Alzheimer's Association group tells them, "I am not suffering. I am struggling", which is a good way of phrasing things. However, I still would have liked to have seen there be any emotion, even overdone ones, to none at all.
Still Alice, I think, will be remembered for being the film that finally got the talented Julianne Moore an Oscar. It should be noted that Moore has not received an Oscar nomination since Still Alice. That makes me think that the Academy figured that they got that over with and could move on. Still Alice is not terrible. It is fine. It also could have been more.
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