Sunday, February 15, 2015

Still Alice

Yesterday afternoon I went to see Julianne Moore in Still Alice.  She was my final Best Actress nominee (see my commentaries on Rosamund Pike, Felicity Jones, and Reese Witherspoon) and I was particularly eager to see her performance as it has generated a fair amount of Oscar buzz with Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Screen Actors Guild Award wins.  Moore plays Dr. Alice Howland, a professor of linguistics at Columbia University who is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease at the age of 50.  It is an intense character study of a woman, known for her ambition, intelligence, and ability to communicate, who loses the very core of her identity and struggles to maintain relationships with her equally ambitious husband (Alec Baldwin) and her children Anna (Kate Bosworth), Tom (Hunter Parish), and Lydia (Kristen Stewart).  Moore gives a gripping tour-de-force performance.  You can literally see pieces of Alice slipping away bit by bit in each frame of the movie and this is particularly apparent when a nearly demented Alice watches a video she made after first receiving her diagnosis where she meticulously instructs her future self on how to kill herself.  The transformation is incredible, especially in light of the fact that most movies are not shot chronologically.  Moore's emotionally nuanced portrayal  draws the audience into the fear and anxiety she feels constantly.  She is most affecting when Alice gets lost jogging on the campus where she has taught for 20 years, when she visits a nursing home and the staff assumes she is looking on behalf of an elderly parent, and when she, who once traveled the country giving lectures, gives a faltering speech to an Alzheimer's symposium.  Directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland chose to shoot many scenes with a shallow depth of field leaving much out of focus and many conversations occur in the periphery of the scene, effectively emphasizing Alice's confusion.   While this movie is definitely a vehicle for Moore, Baldwin gives a strong performance as a man who tries to be supportive but, ultimately, doesn't want his life disrupted and Stewart shines as Alice's ne'er-do-well daughter who is the only one who really sees (and accepts) what Alice is going through.   Still Alice is very sad but I highly recommend it.

Note:  I saw Marion Cotillard, the remaining Best Actress nominee, in Two Days, One Night last week but I didn't especially like the movie so I didn't review it.

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