Still Alice (2014)
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Still Alice Movie Review
Still Alice is a 2014 drama film directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland and starring Julianne Moore. It’s a flawed, but very well acted and moving film.
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“But this isn’t fair.
I don’t have to be fair. I’m your mother“
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Linguistic professor Dr. Alice Howland gets the shock of her life at the age of 50 when she tests positive for an early onset of familial Alzheimer’s disease. This film deals with such a difficult subject matter that at times proved to be too much to handle for me personally. It’s a heartbreaking story through and through. The third act was particularly tough to watch.
The best choice for this film was to depict this horrible disease through the eyes of the patient suffering through it. Yes, that did mean that we got to see very little of what the family was going through, but it’s still crucial to depict the patient first and foremost, which this movie did beautifully. ‘The Father’ would undoubtedly do it in a more cinematic and overall more accomplished manner, but this was a great first step in the right direction.
Let’s talk about Julianne Moore. She is a fantastic actress that deserved to be honored back in 2002 for ‘Far from Heaven’, but thankfully the Academy recognized her amazing work in this movie and she got the Oscar for it. Her performance is layered, emotionally charged and constantly riveting to watch as so many emotions are present on her face at all times. It was a brilliant performance and possibly her career highlight.
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Others also impressed in smaller roles. I would have preferred that her husband stayed with her until the very end, but still Alec Baldwin was surprisingly good in the role. Her children didn’t get too much to do here, but those shared scenes were still wonderful, especially the moments between Alice and Lydia, who was played so well by Kristen Stewart.
Yes, Still Alice is very moving and overall very well made. The duo who directed this film did a good job and the movie is well paced and consistently emotional and powerful. It also has excellent dialogue. However, it’s not without its flaws as it suffers from many pitfalls of these serious dramas about diseases.
One is its very unrelatable depiction of the protagonist who is a scientist. It was too easy to portray characters in these medical professions, but it would have been much more universal and relatable to just depict regular people with lesser jobs who suffer through this condition and how it negatively impacts their livelihood and not just their mental health. It was a huge missed opportunity that really bothered me.
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Another issue is the movie’s refusal to acknowledge what the other family members go through in these situations and to depict the disease in a more detailed manner. This would have made it definitely even more difficult to watch, but still it was necessary. This way, the movie was half-baked as too often it stayed away from depicting the worst circumstances stemming from this illness, which was frustrating. It needed a bolder approach to storytelling and more cinematic elements for sure, but I would still call the movie pretty good for everything that it did right and certainly not as mediocre as some reviewers would make it out to be.
Powerfully acted by Julianne Moore in her amazing Oscar-winning turn, Still Alice is an emotionally charged and powerful look at the effects of Alzheimer’s disease that was wonderfully told through the patient’s point of view. Minus points here go toward its lack of universally relatable characters and its refusal to delve even deeper into this issue, but it’s still a well made movie that really leaves you heartbroken.
My Rating – 4
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#1. Moore won an Oscar over which of these actresses?
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