Still Alice
If Oliver Sacks woke one morning with some exotic amnesia and believed himself to be Nicholas Sparks, he might sit down and bang out a neurology tearjerker like Still Alice. He’d also have to forget, of course, that the Harvard-trained neuroscientist Lisa Genova had already discovered a lucrative publishing niche that pairs brain trauma with domestic drama to make book-club-ready fiction.
It’s Genova who gave us Still Alice, in which a Harvard linguistics professor is diagnosed with a cruelly fast and early form of Alzheimer’s disease. And it’s the movie version of that novel, in which some under-challenged actors find that one family’s envious casual affluence is no match for the mental deterioration of its matriarch, that’s about to vouchsafe Julianne Moore’s long-deserved Academy Award.
There’s not much that’s more deplorably shallow than using industry awards to evaluate a film, or handicapping the Oscar race in the same space used to review a movie. But Still Alice, as written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (the team behind last year’s insipid The Last of Robin Hood, with Kevin Kline), offers nothing to see, consider or discuss beyond Moore’s performance. It’s bad medicine, blocked, shot and edited like an extra-long pharmaceutical commercial — like the part of the ad in which the handsome middle-aged couple takes a break from weekend shopping to go for a gauzy-lighted walk on the beach while an off-camera voice delivers mellifluous cautions about side effects. If you mix it with alcohol, you’ll fall asleep.
Moore is fine — she is almost always at least fine — but she could hardly be anything less with material like this, with its obvious notes and beats. She has been nervier, more vulnerable — sicker and more real — elsewhere. She has been those and other things so reliably and for so long, in fact, that Still Alice is the punishment, hers and ours, for Hollywood’s failure to crown her sooner. Her very ease (an ease matched by Alec Baldwin, who suggests so much more than what he’s allowed to play as Alice’s husband) only makes you more aware just how flimsy the narrative scaffolding is here.
The ballast on that framework is Kristen Stewart, as the only one of Alice’s adult children who fully delivers for Mom. Glatzer and Westmoreland use Stewart’s typical glumness to suggest that her character is the black sheep, but that’s as transparent a feint as the rest of the movie is predictable. Alzheimer’s at 50 is enemy and complication enough without saddling this 95-minute story with an attempt at daughterly redemption. But that’s the kind of movie Still Alice is: one in which sickness brings out the brave nobility in the afflicted and in an enlightened loving few, all of whom deserve, you know, an award or something.
