Julianne Moore finally realized that the one way to win an Oscar is to play a sick person. Thankfully, she didn't go with something like schizophrenia or other diseases that have been put on film countless times before. Instead, she picked early on-set Alzheimer's disease. While the subject material might be unique, that doesn't mean that Still Alice is any more than a ho-hum movie that's more about trying to garner awards than bring attention to a disease few people know about.
Moore, one of the great actresses in American film today, plays Dr. Alice Howland, a linguistics professor at Columbia in New York City. She suddenly starts to forget little things and goes to a neurologist who puts her through further tests. After subsequent visits, she is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, despite only being 50 years old.
Thankfully for Alice, she has a strong family to support her. Her husband, John (Alec Baldwin), insists that he will always be there, no matter how hard her life becomes. They have three children, two of whom live in New York. Anna (Kate Bosworth) and her husband are about to have twins. Tom (Hunter Parrish) is a medical student. Their youngest, Lydia (Kristen Stewart), is training to be an actress in Los Angeles.
Still Alice isn't structured as a typical movie about dealing with disease and that's largely due to the disease itself. There is no cure for Alzheimer's. Sure, Alice may be lucky enough to reach a plateau, where her memory loss begins to slow, but there's no way this movie can end triumphantly. Indeed, the only way we can have a happy ending is if Alice still keeps her family support system. That's the real key of the film. Alice is the main force, but how her family reacts is just as important as seeing her memory whittle away.
The real challenge for Moore is the fact that the disease also isn't something tangible. Unlike The Theory of Everything's Eddie Redmayne, who had to portray a physical disease, Moore needs the audience to trust her when she loses her memory. It's one thing to just say, “Oh, I forgot where my phone is.” It's another thing to act like you just forgot your phone. This is why Moore deserves every bit of the Oscar that's coming her way.
Her performance is similar to Joanne Woodward's in The Three Faces of Eve. Woodward had to successfully sell to the audience that three personalities lived inside mind. Here, Moore has to sell losing her memory. We see the emotional pain of an elite college professor suddenly being unable to communicate.
Sadly, Still Alice has much more in common with The Three Faces of Eve. Both films hinge solely on its female lead performance, with their directors struggling to find a good supporting cast to build around their stars. Here, married writer/director duo Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmorland assume that Alec Baldwin or Kristen Stewart can play the main secondary parts without direction. Baldwin struggles to play a caring husband, so much so that it comes as no surprise when he makes his final decision in the film. Stewart isn't too bad though, avoiding that habit of not showing emotion she has faced in her blockbusters.
Glatzer and Westmorland's script, based on Lisa Genova's book of the same name, also doesn't fall in the “beginning-middle-end” format. Instead, there's a beginning and a middle, but not really much of an end. Alice's disease continues to develop and take turns for the worse, but there's very little conflict in the film. Her support system is always there and, due to the family's elite status, the audience can't be convinced that there's any financial danger when it comes to taking care of her.
The scariest moment in the film comes at the very beginning, when Alice suddenly forgets where she is, even though she has just jogged to Columbia. It's a tense scene and almost takes you a second to figure out what's going on, especially if you don't go into this film knowing what it's about. But there are few other scenes like it. Glatzer and Westmorland don't really capitalize on the best moments that Moore can give them, like the touching shot of her putting toothpaste on a mirror to cloud her image. One can at least give them kudos for avoiding obvious tropes like making the image out of focus too frequently.
Still Alice is too good to call a bad movie, but it's not great enough. Moore pulls off a truly remarkable performance, but had Glatzer and Westmorland realize that one great performance does not make a great whole, this would have been a better effort overall.