Still Alice review – moving meditation on who we really are
This inexpressibly painful and sad film from Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer is about a woman who declines steeply into early-onset Alzheimer’s just after her 50th birthday, and somehow becomes a ghost haunting her own life.
It features a queenly, poignant and much-garlanded lead performance from Julianne Moore as linguistics professor Alice Howland. She begins the movie at the triumphant height of her career, enjoying a happy life with her husband John (Alec Baldwin), prosperous empty-nesters in a sumptuous New York home. They have three lovely grownup children: Tom (Hunter Parrish), Anna (Kate Bosworth) and Lydia (Kristen Stewart). The only problem in Alice’s life appears to be her strained relationship with Lydia, who has rejected college to be a struggling actor in Los Angeles.
With a terrible, almost Nabokovian irony, Alice’s dementia begins with her inability to remember the word ‘lexicon’ while giving a lecture, although Westmoreland and Glatzer show how the condition has a kind of prehistorical moment at her birthday dinner the night before, when Alice overhears her son-in-law talk about “sisters” arguing and for some reason thinks he must be talking about her relationship with her own sister, who died in a car crash when they were teenagers. As her disease advances, Alice is lost in thought about this dead sister. The terrible diagnosis arrives, and I defy any audience in the world not to strain frantically to complete the memory test that a doctor gives Alice in one heartwrenching scene. There are, moreover, terrible genetic implications to her condition.
Still Alice is perhaps a relatively straightforward film on this subject, compared with, say, Sarah Polley’s Away From Her (2006) in which Julie Christie’s Alzheimer patient forms a relationship with another man in a care home, or Richard Eyre’s Iris (2001) in which Iris Murdoch, played by Judi Dench, descends into dementia in a kind of flashback parallel with the story of her younger self. There is admittedly something of the TV movie of the week in Still Alice, a little like Do You Remember Love, from 1985, starring Joanne Woodward.
Alice’s wealth admittedly makes palliative care an awful lot easier than for others less well off: the comfortable family set up, and Baldwin’s presence as the husband sometimes makes this film look weirdly like a very dark version of Nancy Meyers’s comfort-food relationship comedy It’s Complicated. Yet Moore’s heartfelt and self-possessed performance, as taut as a violin string, makes this a commanding film. It also boasts one truly sensational scene in which scared and bewildered Alice comes across a video message to herself: this is a flash of macabre ingenuity, as suspenseful as any thriller.
The crisis is all there in the title. Is she “still Alice”? Despite all the agony, the fear and the indignity of Alzheimer’s, is there some unbreachable core of identity that will remain? Or is Alice’s self utterly eroded, reduced to a set of symptoms?
It is an open question. Westmoreland and Glatzer give us a scene when Alice’s disease is at a reasonably advanced stage, and show John getting the chance for a big career step-up that would mean moving from New York to Minnesota, though New York is a place which Alice loved – or loves. John assumes, without admitting or realising it, that she is not still Alice, that he can take her anywhere, give her the best care and continue with his own professional life. The question of whether she is, in fact, still Alice is to lead to a family crisis without anyone couching it in precisely these terms.
This film moreover has one thing that other movies about dementia do not: some very sharp, shrewd insights about how computer technology allows dementia sufferers to manage their symptoms – or conceal them. Or is it that technology use is itself a symptom? Alice is as addicted to her smartphone as anyone else. But she is increasingly dependent on its personal-organiser functions, and she Googles things on her phone that she should be able to remember without help. Are the earlier stages of her disease a parable for what we are all experiencing: a new kind of Googleheimer’s? This is an affecting and thoroughly worthwhile film on a very contemporary topic – with some Larkinian reflections on what will and won’t survive of us.
What: An Alzheimer's patient's story
When: after 50 years old
Keywords:
Alzheimer
memory
family
remember
personal-organiser fuctions
網址:https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/05/still-alice-julianne-moore-oscar-alzheimers
