Alice through a glass, darkly

Well-acted tale likely to bring cascade of tears

Alice Howland (Julianne Moore, Best Actress Oscar front-runner) is a 50-year-old professor of linguistics who receives a terrifying diagnosis in Still Alice.
Alice Howland (Julianne Moore, Best Actress Oscar front-runner) is a 50-year-old professor of linguistics who receives a terrifying diagnosis in Still Alice.

There are countless ways to approach any work of art. Our response to any given movie depends in part on how we prepare ourselves for it. Going into Still Alice, I knew certain things about it.

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Alice (Julianne Moore) must cope with the news that she has early onset Alzheimer’s disease in Still Alice.

I understood it was a drama about a woman who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Like most people my age, I have some experience with people suffering from dementia, so I knew that watching it might remind me of sad times I've experienced actually or vicariously. I expected I might find it difficult to watch, especially since the protagonist is played by Julianne Moore, a fine actor capable of delicately calibrated performances. I understood that, for whatever it is worth, her work in the movie (as well as her four previous nominations) had made her the prohibitive favorite for this year' Best Actress Oscar.

Still Alice

88 Cast: Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kate Bosworth, Kristen Stewart, Hunter Parrish

Directors: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland

Rating: PG-13, for mature thematic material, and brief language including a sexual reference

Running time: 101 minutes

On the other hand, I have seen lots of movies and I neither enjoy nor feel myself particularly susceptible to emotional manipulation. I thought there was a chance I would despise Still Alice, that it would be a shabby, sentimental and exploitative vehicle in which an expert pretender snatched at her main chance to gnash and wail her way to a gold statuette. Sometimes I find myself immune to "moving" performances.

What is important about a work of art is not its architecture or its surface details -- not its "craftsmanship" -- which are the things critics and artists who become articulate about their work tend to talk about. What is important about a work of art is how it hooks up the people who made it with the people who consume it; how well it conducts the intent of the maker to the audience. Goethe used to call this vital transmission the "Gehalt" of the piece, and it was was what the critic Robert Warshow had in mind when he wrote: "A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man."

So I feel compelled to tell you I made it through about 45 minutes of Still Alice before I had to turn it off. I did not want to cry over a movie in front of my wife. Now, if you see Still Alice in a theater, you will probably not have the luxury of returning to it a couple of nights later as I did. You might have to sit there and sob. Whether you want to do that is up to you; it is just my job to prepare you.

This isn't the best movie Moore has ever made, but her performance is the equal of her remarkable turns in Safe (1995), Boogie Nights (1997) and Far From Heaven (2002). She is as good as advertised as Alice Howland, a professor of linguistics at Columbia University and an intelligent person who immediately grasps the inevitable consequences of her diagnosis. Alice knows that everything will fall away from her, that she will break the hearts of her family before being overtaken by obliviousness. She knows it's not a fight she can win, and so she takes steps to try to protect all of them from the worst.

She does this by setting an elaborate and ingenious trap, and arming herself with a video message she records with extraordinary patience and restraint. Alice's defining characteristic, other than her ironically sharp mind, may be the kindness with which she wields this instrument. A kindness she extends even to her future self.

Moore's performance is balanced by Alec Baldwin's mildly surprising turn as Alice's husband, John, an academic researcher whose denial of Alice's condition is complicated by what would otherwise be an unrefusable offer from the Mayo Clinic. John is neither the supportive saint nor the heel we might expect. He's a complicated man who has spent half his life married to a vital and vivacious woman. Baldwin allows a prickly irritation to show through his worn-out stoicism and solicitude -- he behaves exactly as a decent man who knows what's expected of him would behave, but he can't quell the resentment in his eyes.

What's weakest about Still Alice is the terseness in which John and Alice's grown children (played well enough by Kate Bosworth, Kristen Stewart and Hunter Parrish) are dealt with, and a correctly clinical, doggedly linear script that feels like a purely functional string on which to bead pathological discussions and episodes demonstrating the inexorable downward pull of the disease.

There's a directness to the production that might feel blunt were it not elevated by Moore and Baldwin's heartbreaking duet performance, which mirrors the dynamics of a working marriage and draws occluding tears from seasoned critics looking to rise above their instinctive reactions and see the thing clearly.

Still Alice made me cry. Make of that what you will.

MovieStyle on 02/13/2015

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