Still Alice review – Julianne Moore shines in a performance rich with insight

The route to Julianne Moore’s recent Academy Award for this powerfully low-key Alzheimer’s drama has been circuitous. Back in May 2014, a Cannes best actress award pegged her as an Oscar frontrunner for her fearsomely poisonous turn in David Cronenberg’s scabrous Maps to the Stars. When that film’s US release date was pushed back to 2015, Moore appeared to have been cruelly robbed of what would surely have been her fifth Academy Award nomination. But then Still Alice premiered at Toronto in September, returning her to the front of the pack with a film more attuned to traditional Oscar-voter sensibilities. Moore’s overdue win was both deserved and popular, recognising a performance rich in sympathy, grace and insight – although personally I’d love to have seen her garlanded for Maps to the Stars, not least because it takes real guts to play a character as massively unsympathetic as the hateful Havana Segrand.

Adapted from the novel by neuroscientist Lisa Genova, Still Alice casts Moore as a 50-year-old linguistics professor whose bouts of forgetfulness are devastatingly diagnosed as early onset Alzheimer’s. Like its generic predecessors Away from Her and Iris, what follows is a potentially worthy drama raised shoulder high by a brilliant central performance – the key difference being that co-writer/directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (who made the brilliant Quinceañera) prioritise Alice’s point of view over the experiences of her loved ones. Having been defined by her keen intelligence and dexterity with language, Alice finds the very core of her being slipping away – she fumbles lectures at work, struggles with the word-search game she plays obsessively on her mobile, and increasingly finds herself lost in a once-familiar world. Worse, her diagnosis reveals that her rare condition is hereditary, and may be passed to the children who are still reeling from their mother’s illness. Meanwhile, loving husband John (Alec Baldwin, playing an Oscar-winner’s spouse for the second year running) declares reassuringly that “whatever happens, I’ll be here”, but finds his own career plans and patience sorely tested.

Anyone with experience of caring for a person with Alzheimer’s (and the numbers are increasing) will recognise the peculiar manifestations that this movie gets just right: the initially random lapses in memory; the bewildering disorientation that ensues; the precipitous sense of foreboding that comes with diagnosis. Yet equally important (and well observed) is the rolling persistence of normality, the condition coming and going likes waves on a beach, a metaphor from which this somewhat televisual film does not shy away. In one lovely scene, Alice and John are pictured alone by the ocean, laughing, smiling, loving in a manner which takes them back to memories of their younger selves. When rebellious daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart, in terrifically natural form) asks “What does it actually feel like?” Alice’s response has the articulate ring of truth: some days she can “almost pass for a normal person” while on others “I feel like I can’t find myself…”

Aided by cinematographer Denis Lenoir’s use of shallow depth of field to express Alice’s interior isolation, Moore does a brilliant job of drawing us into her increasingly unfamiliar world, the set of her smile and the anxiety of her stance saying as much as the elusive words for which she reaches with palpable pain. The same is true of Alice’s close family, who react to her diagnosis by declaring “that makes no sense”, and then variously come to terms with her attempts to master the “art of losing” (a reference to an Elizabeth Bishop poem) as horror turns to habit. The scene in which John and Alice first break the news to their children is particularly impressive, each member of the ensemble cast exhibiting one of several instantly recognisable reactions – a group shot with everyone at the top of their game.

There are problems. While Alice’s comparative youth reminds us that Alzheimer’s is a disease rather than a function of old age (Alice rages that cancer would feel less shameful), it runs the risk of special pleading, suggesting that the travails of a young, intelligent, attractive woman are somehow more tragic than the more mundane (and less cinematic) struggles others face every day. Yet Moore overcomes such potential pitfalls, universalising Alice’s situation even in the rarefied environment of her upper-echelon lifestyle. Instead, we find ourselves focusing on the strange role that technology plays in her changing routine, her mobile phone proving a talismanic memory test, her laptop hiding messages sent to herself which bizarrely echo the videotapes from the amnesiac thriller Before I Go to Sleep.

What’s most remarkable is that Richard Glatzer made the movie while battling motor neurone disease, his own indomitable spirit (aided by the same technology Alice employs) matching that of the film’s protagonist. As the title suggests, this is a film about the persistence of the personality in the face of failing physicality, a theme which clearly resonated throughout the production. The subject matter may be tough, and the end-point inevitable, but the message we take away is defiant and ultimately uplifting.