 | Adapted from Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel of the same name, Still Alice is a very serious story beautifully told. |
Adapted from Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel of the same name, Still Alice is a rare film possessed with the same courage as Michael Haneke’s unflinching ‘Amour’, shining a light into poignant family issues.
Julianne Moore (Far From Heaven: Boogie Nights) in an emotionally rewarding Golden Globe nominated performance plays Alice Howland a 50-year-old successful Columbia University linguistics professor happily married with three grown children, who struggles after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. The film follows a very straight trajectory into this cruellest of all neurological disorders – rendered especially cruel when Alice, who has three children, finds out she has a rare, hereditary kind.
Daughters Kate Bosworth (Big Sur), Kristen Stewart (Twilight) and husband Alec Baldwin (To Rome With Love) maintain a strained and troubled yet tender existence with Alice, which co-directors Richard Glatzer (who himself has Alzheimer’s) and Wash Westmoreland perceptively focus on to provide a convincing and complex understanding of familial relationships without ever resorting to sentimentality.
The more the affliction increases, the more engrossing the film becomes. Coping becomes the function of a once privileged and orderly life, and panic sets in over something as simple as tying a shoelace or misplacing a cell phone. Alice’s cloudless marriage is put to the test like an examination final, her job is terminated, and her children react in touching and disturbing ways, especially when they all discover her rare form of the disease can be passed on genetically and her married daughter is having a baby.
The bristling impatience of Alec Baldwin’s persona is ideally harnessed as John, Alice’s husband, whose scoffing denial of her initial diagnosis elicits lightning rage from his wife – she’s used to him not listening. Kate Bosworth, as their tightly-wound eldest daughter, and Kristen Stewart, as her sister Lydia, do lovely, complementary work.
A very serious story beautifully told.
Julianne Moore (Far From Heaven: Boogie Nights) in an emotionally rewarding Golden Globe nominated performance plays Alice Howland a 50-year-old successful Columbia University linguistics professor happily married with three grown children, who struggles after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. The film follows a very straight trajectory into this cruellest of all neurological disorders – rendered especially cruel when Alice, who has three children, finds out she has a rare, hereditary kind.
Daughters Kate Bosworth (Big Sur), Kristen Stewart (Twilight) and husband Alec Baldwin (To Rome With Love) maintain a strained and troubled yet tender existence with Alice, which co-directors Richard Glatzer (who himself has Alzheimer’s) and Wash Westmoreland perceptively focus on to provide a convincing and complex understanding of familial relationships without ever resorting to sentimentality.
The more the affliction increases, the more engrossing the film becomes. Coping becomes the function of a once privileged and orderly life, and panic sets in over something as simple as tying a shoelace or misplacing a cell phone. Alice’s cloudless marriage is put to the test like an examination final, her job is terminated, and her children react in touching and disturbing ways, especially when they all discover her rare form of the disease can be passed on genetically and her married daughter is having a baby.
The bristling impatience of Alec Baldwin’s persona is ideally harnessed as John, Alice’s husband, whose scoffing denial of her initial diagnosis elicits lightning rage from his wife – she’s used to him not listening. Kate Bosworth, as their tightly-wound eldest daughter, and Kristen Stewart, as her sister Lydia, do lovely, complementary work.
A very serious story beautifully told.
