Still Alice
First screened in September 2014 / Most recently screened and reviewed in February 2022
Directors: Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. Cast: Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth, Stephen Kunken, Hunter Parrish, Shane McRae, Erin Darke. Screenplay: Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (based on the novel by Lisa Genova).

 Twitter Capsule: Moore is good; scenes with Stewart, Baldwin, Kunken all show promise. Pace off. Images say too little, score too much.

In Brief: (2024) Formal modesty can be a demerit but also escapes more highfalutin approaches to memory destruction. Wise, well-acted.

VOR: ③  Stylistically Less than a feast. Still, food for thought about parent-child dynamics, orphans as adults, smart people trying to outwit illness.


   
Photo © 2014 Sony Pictures Classics / Killer Films
After my slightly lukewarm response in 2014, this one just keeps growing on me. Part of me can't help craving even more intricacy or nuance in the shots, the overall aesthetic, and especially the music. However, after three viewings now, I feel both that I missed some subtle craftsmanship on the technical level (especially regarding the editing) and that I made those considerations too important. One thing I admire a lot about Still Alice is how much it embraces a crystal clear, eminently accessible storytelling mode to convey an experience that is tempting to exploit or over-embellish with formal trickery. I've frankly admired and even loved several films that followed the latter route, but the forthrightness of Still Alice brings the experience of Alice's decline and her family's response even closer to home. There's a reason I have thought back so often on persistent textures and particular beats in this tale, compared to more "accomplished" movies on related subjects on which I almost never reflect, except in the midst of rewatching them.

I've always admired the candor, clarity, and fine-grained craft of Moore's performance. Moreover, I relish how it pulls together one strand of her career that has emphasized characters with an unsettlingly empty or opaque interior (Vanya, Safe, The Hours, even, despite all of Linda's bluster, Magnolia) and another strand of women who stand out more for their everyday demeanor and eminent recognizability in the world outside the theater (Crazy Stupid Love, Short Cuts, the gorgeous apogee of Gloria Bell). Still Alice, I think, finds Moore calling on two sets of gifts and reaching out simultaneously to at least two of her loyal audiences, even while playing a character who precisely cannot access her own considerable storehouse of talents and past successes, and whose only remaining audience is one that can't help reminding her of her steady erosion. Alice's story is moving to experience by her side but also gratifying to meta-assess from the standpoint of savoring this ingenious, adventurous, and perpetually evolving actress...

...none of which should short-change that when I think about Still Alice, my thoughts often turn quickly or even turn first to Alec Baldwin's dexterous work as her committed husband, whose choices or reactions the audience may not always cheer but who never ever gets pigeonholed as the Bad Partner; Stephen Kunken, who offers a concisely pristine piece of far-from-the-spotlight character acting as Alice's neurologist; and especially Kristen Stewart, so ideally cast as the daughter whom everyone in the family has the shakiest sense of, but who turns out to have the greatest resources of care, curiosity, and responsiveness in a deepening crisis (which doesn't mean this generous movie gives her siblings too hard a time).

Still Alice is as much a movie about family as about an individual struggle. It's also a movie about saying goodbye to a decades-long vocation that may mean as much to you as your family, or close enough. It's also about asking people what it feels like to go through what they're going through, beyond just expressing condolence or commiseration. It's also about the messages we leave ourselves for later about what life feels like now, and the reminders we inherit from ourselves, sometimes unsuspectingly, about how similar but also how different our lives were before. It's also about a disease that is uniquely adroit at circumventing even our best laid plans for being agents of our own caretaking, trying to ensure we have the final say. And it's about the dear, private memories and the old wounds that are sometimes so fundamental to who we are that they are what we see most, or see last, as everything fades to black or to white, even amidst the ambience and evidence of an astonishingly wonderful life and a full hearth of people we adore, who adore us back. Grade: B+

Academy Award Nominations and Winners:
★Best Actress: Julianne Moore

Golden Globe Nominations and Winners:
★Best Actress (Drama): Julianne Moore

Other Awards:
Screen Actors Guild Awards: Best Actress (Moore)
Independent Spirit Awards: Best Actress (Moore)
Chicago Film Critics Association: Best Actress (Moore)
National Board of Review: Best Actress (Moore)
British Academy Awards (BAFTAs): Best Actress (Moore)
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