AFI Fest Review: Still Alice

It would have been so easy for Still Alice to go wrong a dozen different ways.  Stories about life-changing diagnoses are plum ground for melodrama and sappiness.  These are the tales that activate our tear ducts, sometimes through manipulative means.  Not so here.  Richard Glazer and Wash Westmoreland have brought Lisa Genova's novel to the big screen with startling subtlety.  Yes, Julianne Moore carries the film on her able shoulders, but her performance is just the main piece of a film that delivers on multiple fronts.

Moore plays Alice, a linguistics professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, a rare occurence at her age.  Her family rallies around her, even her rebellious youngest pursuing an acting career in Los Angeles, Lydia (Kristen Stewart).  An expert on the way humans acquire language, Alice begins to lose control of her words, and her world.  "It feels like my brain is fucking dying," she tells her loved ones, as her memory lapses more and more, and familiar places become foreign.  She must "come out" again and again, as the situation comes into focus and every aspect of her life becomes more complicated.

Glazer and Westmoreland do a fine job of reflecting Alice's disease cinematically.  The camera often focuses on the back of Alice's head, trying to penetrate through to her foggy mind.  We are frustrated by the lack of cues from this perrspective, just as Alice is by the words that dangle in front of her but can't be reached.  The use of shallow focus is expert, signalling how the world becomes unknowable, and how trapped within herself Alice is.

Moore has led one of the most impressive careers in Hollywood, defying typical Hollywood rules about age and beauty, continually proving to be among the best things about the movies she's in.  She has straddled the worlds of drama and comedy, film and television, and has proven herself adept in any realm, on any budget, in any genre.  Here, she gives perhaps her best performance, a tightrope walk of subtlely and power.  All it takes is a miniscule change in her facial expression for us to know that Alice is in the midst of a memory lapse; her identity splinters as she becomes a student in the art of losing.  Moore is heartbreaking, genuinely so.  She never goes for the Big Oscar Scene, never showboats.  She keeps the drama on a personal level, bearing the wear and tear of routine and family matters with what dignity can be salvaged in the face of such a tragic disease.  The way Moore evinces Alice's maternal instinct, and pride in who is is and what she has done, is beautiful.

Kristen Stewart is at her best, doing her best work since The Runaways as the no-bullshit member of the family.  While the rest of the family walks on tiptoes or whispers behind Alice's back, Lydia boldly faces the music.  Alice's condition gives the two a chance to reconnect, and their shared scenes are some of the film's most emotionally satisfying.

It's a very emotional, and satisfying, movie.  I can't remember the last time a movie gutted me so.  The cruel irony of the situation, the fragile family dynamics, the gradual loss of self - Still Alice doesn't shy away from the brual reality of being really sick.  It's unfair, bizarre, and tragic.  Here, it's the core of a heart-wrenching story, well and tenderly told.