Losing Her Bearings in Familiar Places
In ‘Still Alice,’ a Professor Slides Into Alzheimer’s
By A. O. SCOTT
DECEMBER 4, 2014
“Still Alice” is a movie that addresses a nightmarish circumstance with calm, compassionate sensitivity. Based on Lisa Genova’s novel and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, it follows the deterioration of a Columbia linguistics professor who learns she has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Alice Howland (Julianne Moore), along with her husband and three children, must endure a cruel and absurd ordeal that has no real chance of growing easier. With what seems like shocking rapidity — the film’s chronology is appropriately fuzzy — Alice slides from a witty, intelligent, capable adult into a fragile and confused shadow of her former self.
The title suggests otherwise, of course, and one of the tragedies of Alzheimer’s for the friends and family of the afflicted person is that the sufferer seems present and absent at the same time. “Still Alice” examines both the philosophical and emotional aspects of this paradoxical situation, and the principal vehicle for the inquiry is Ms. Moore’s exquisitely nuanced performance. From the early scenes, when brief memory lapses signal that something is wrong, through the subsequent deterioration of her cognitive ability, she conveys both the collapse of Alice’s inner world and the panic it causes. The structure of her face seems to change from scene to scene, as her eyes grow duller, her mouth and jaw slacker. As she did in “Safe,” she finds a way to communicate the pathos of emptiness.
But the film as a whole functions mainly as a scaffolding for this remarkable feat of acting, and also for Kristen Stewart’s excellent work as Alice’s younger daughter, Lydia. The success of the “Twilight” movies has allowed Ms. Stewart’s gifts to be underrated, but her more recent roles (here, in “ Camp X-Ray” and in “Clouds of Sils Maria,” which will open next year) should help re-establish her as an insightful and unpredictable talent.
There are tensions at the beginning between Lydia and her mother — in an early scene, Alice picks apart her daughter’s life choices with relentless, passive-aggressive skill — but Lydia is also frequently the only member of the family brave or honest enough to accept who her mother becomes and to find ways of staying connected to her.
It’s not that the others fail, exactly. Alice’s husband, John (Alec Baldwin), a research physician, works hard to be tender and supportive, as do the other children, played by Kate Bosworth and Hunter Parrish. The problem is that the film, concentrating on the accurate portrayal of Alice’s condition, leaves the other characters undeveloped, and their social and domestic milieu hastily sketched. The test of realism in a movie like this — the thing that would separate it from a conventional, made-for-television disease melodrama — is whether you can imagine lives for the secondary characters when they aren’t on screen.
“Still Alice” lacks that kind of thickness. It surrounds Alice and her family with the signifiers of a perfect, privileged life: impressive jobs, well-raised children, a Manhattan brownstone and a lovely beach house, neither one too showy. But all of this feels like a too tidy garden that has been planted for the sole purpose of introducing a blight and observing its ravages. The story is sad and sincerely told, but it is too removed from life to carry the full measure of pain that Alice deserves.
who:Alice
what:Alice has earlt-onset Alzheimer's disease and must endure a cruel absurd ordeal that has no real chance of growing eaiser.
1.circumstance 情況
2.sensitivity 敏感
3.deterioration 惡化
4.tragedies 悲劇
5.paradoxical 矛盾的
6.principal 主要
7.subsequent 隨後
8.portrayal 描繪
9.separate 分離
10.ravages肆虐 毀壞
what:Alice has earlt-onset Alzheimer's disease and must endure a cruel absurd ordeal that has no real chance of growing eaiser.
1.circumstance 情況
2.sensitivity 敏感
3.deterioration 惡化
4.tragedies 悲劇
5.paradoxical 矛盾的
6.principal 主要
7.subsequent 隨後
8.portrayal 描繪
9.separate 分離
10.ravages肆虐 毀壞
