Still Alice—Movie Review

by Peter J. O'Connell

Still Alice. Released widely: Feb. 2015. Runtime: 101 mins. Rated: PG-13 for thematic material and brief language, including a sexual reference.

Still Alice is a memorable movie about a woman's loss of memory and her and her family's attempts to deal with that crisis. The woman is Alice, 50 years old, a noted and popular professor of linguistics, played by Julianne Moore in a superb, Oscar-winning performance.

After Alice cannot remember a certain word in a speech and becomes confused about the location of her office on campus, she consults specialists and receives a diagnosis of a rare affliction, early-onset Alzheimer's. Alice's diagnosis is not only painfully ironic given her profession but also inconceivably sad in that the disease may be passed from parents to children—and Alice has a son and two daughters, one of whom (Kate Bosworth) is pregnant. The scene in which Alice tells her children of her diagnosis is wrenching—and not the only one in the film that is.

The film depicts with both power and sensitivity—but never sentimentality—how Alice deteriorates over a relatively short period of time and goes from stage to stage in a brave but losing struggle against the thief that is stealing her brilliant, beautiful mind. The film also shows how the members of Alice's family go from stage to stage in their own specific struggles, trying to maintain their life-styles while helping Alice, and feeling both anger at her and compassion for her—and guilt that they may not be doing enough for her.

Alec Baldwin gives a solid, somewhat stolid—appropriately so—performance as Alice's husband. Kristen Stewart, who plays Alice's rebellious yet loving younger daughter, has often been derided for blank-faced performances in previous films but here proves that she can act, quite well too.

Still Alice, based on a novel by Lisa Genova, is a movie movingly co-directed by the married team of Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer. 

“Footnotes” to the film: (1) Novelist Lisa Genova has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard. (2) The raw, honest depiction of illness in Still Alice undoubtedly owes much to the fact that Richard Glatzer is living with ALS (Lou Gehrig';s Disease) and cannot speak. ALS is the same disease that physicist Stephen Hawking has, as depicted in The Theory of Everything. (3) France apparently feels that Kristen Stewart can indeed act and recently awarded her a Cesar, their equivalent of the Oscar, for her supporting role in a film with Juliette Binoche. Stewart is the first American actress to receive a Cesar.