Give or take, your average Hollywood terminal disease is made up of the following ingredients: a graphic depiction of the worst symptoms of said disease, a good number of blows below the belt, a melodramatic approach to the patient’s long pain, exploitative and manipulative manoeuvres to gain the viewers’ sympathy, an awful deterioration of the patient, some moments of implausible triumph over the disease, a heavily sentimental tone throughout, and a life-affirming message — despite it all. Think of The Faults in Our Stars, My Sister’s Keepers, Letters to God, or Dying Young. All of them are unabashedly intent on making the viewers weep and experience catharsis so they can leave the movie theatre feeling they’ve felt the right thing.
To a large degree, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s Still Alice doesn’t indulge in almost any of these ill-fated choices. Based on Lisa Genova’s novel, Still Alice follows the tribulations of Alice (Julianne Moore) a nearly 50-year-old talented linguistics professor who after experiencing symptoms of memory loss is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, albeit in its early stages. Hers is a very rare case, as most people only get the disease in their late sixties or early seventies, but nonetheless it will unfold as any regular case.
Cleary knowing how she will end up and somehow accepting it, Alice still puts up a fight in order to remain the person she’s always been for as long as possible: a person with an identity, in touch with her loved ones, and with much cherished memories.
So instead of being your average Hollywood terminal disease, Still Alice eschews most of the obvious traits that would’ve turned it into a miserable tearjerker. Yet it does resort to some needless sentimentality to stress dire circumstances that are already hard to endure. Not that it is undue, but the point is whether it’s truly necessary or not. I believe it’s not.
On the other hand, it portrays some stages of the disease in a moderately controlled manner. And I’d dare say there are no blows below the belt. Viewers’ empathy is gained through the simplest means: by straightforwardly exposing Alzheimer’s different stages until the very end. Then again, to tone down the ending suggesting she can hold on forever to some memories of love is not exactly fair — even if it’s meant to be poetic and not literal.
And the life-affirming, well-meant message conveyed through Alice’s public testimony at a convention feels like Hollywood stuff more than anything else. Plus the screenplay’s examination of the entire affair is not as complex as you’d expect from a drama that could have certainly been more layered and nuanced. Sometimes Still Alice doesn’t probe deep enough — and it doesn’t want to.
But the best news is that Julianne Moore’s compellingly underplayed performance, for which she won an Oscar for Best Actress, is to be praised. Granted, these are the kind of roles that the Academy tends to favour — instead of her more complex part, and better performance, in Cronenberg’s disturbing Maps to the Stars — and yet
Moore raises significantly above the standard and always takes a step back when many other actresses would have gone over the top. At the same time, she manages to be as vulnerable and aching as you’d think her character is. It’s her who really makes a difference here.
