Still Alice

Still Alice (12A)

USA 2014  101 mins  Dir: Wash Westmoreland, Richard Glatzer Starring: Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth

Julianne Moore scooped up just about every Best Actress gong going (Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe, etc) during this year’s awards season. But it is perhaps significant that this was the only category in which Still Alice was recognised. Working from Lisa Genova’s novel, writer/director duo Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer supply talented Ms. Moore with a peach of a suffering woman role, which might have been machine-tooled to appeal to Oscar voters’ sensibilities. Indisputably outstanding though her performance is, however, the script rarely transcends TV movie disease of the week formula. Put it up against Michael Haneke’s supremely rigorous Amour or Sarah Polley’s affecting Away From Her and its shortcomings are even more obvious.

Moore plays Columbia University linguistics professor Alice Howland, who has a nice New York home, a loving if busy and frequently distracted medical researcher hubby (Baldwin) and three adult children, two of whom are thriving and successful. The black sheep is sulky aspiring actress Lydia (Stewart). At the age of 50, Alice has started to – irony alert! – forget words. Recognising the decline in her cognitive abilities, she consults a neurologist and eventually receives a devastating diagnosis: early-onset Alzheimer’s. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it turns out that she has the even crueller hereditary form of the disease, which means that each of her offspring stands a 50/50 chance of developing it too.

Unless they intend to be thoroughly dishonest, there’s only one way that dramas of this nature can go. Westmoreland and Glatzer plod through it with bland efficiency, hitting all the expected beats, cushioning nasty reality when things threaten to get too unpleasant, and leaving the supporting characters frustratingly undeveloped. The fact that a genetic test is available presents Alice’s son and daughters with an agonising dilemma that you might expect the script to explore more fully. Equally, Baldwin’s underwritten role robs the film of the long-term partner’s perspective that so enriched Away From Her. Instead, the focus remains on Alice, perhaps because everyone involved recognises that it’s Moore’s superb performance alone that elevates this somewhat mundane material. The camera lingers on her face as Alice works her way through a series of increasingly ineffectual coping strategies, capturing her frustration as she gradually recedes from the world. It would be a glib cheap shot to describe the film as forgettable, but the only sequence that lingers in the memory is the one in which Alice discovers a video message she prepared for herself while her faculties were relatively intact.