Film review: Still Alice - Julianne Moore turns up the drama
Academy Award nominee Julianne Moore delivers a delicately measured performance as an Alzheimer's sufferer in Still Alice.
Starring: Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin
Directors: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland
Category: IIA
It's been a good few months for acting in smaller American films so far — and here comes a delicately measured performance from five-time Academy Award nominee Julianne Moore in Still Alice.
Aided by a careful script that avoids sentimentality in preference to emotional brutality, Moore expresses the growing despair of a woman coping with chronic and progressive memory loss with a sad realism that is uncomfortable and touching by turns.
In adapting Lisa Genova's bestselling novel, writer-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland have worked hard to ensure the story rings true, and they've succeeded in depicting the debilitating progression of Alzheimer's.
Moore (pictured) plays Alice Howland, a 52-year-old linguistics professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's — meaning it strikes her considerably earlier than the more common version does others. The film matter-of-factly notes her memory's downward spiral, showing her forgetting what she's saying during her lectures, wetting herself because she has forgotten where her bathroom is, and starting to lose a sense of her identity. Alice's children (played by Kristen Stewart, Hunter Parrish and Kate Bosworth) are sympathetic, but busy with their lives, and her husband John (Alec Baldwin) is caring but distant.