Still Alice - Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland
This is part of my unedited thoughts series.
This film looks at the impact of early-onset Alzheimer’s on Alice and her family. The decision to integrate both the impact on Alice and the way the disease is passed onto her children is bold but ultimately flawed.
Alice is diagnosed with a type of Alzheimer’s that can be passed on to her children. This is an interesting and original idea. The problem is that for this to be properly integrated we need to know more about the children than we do.
Because the children are only given a cursory once over we don’t get to see how this really affects them and that would have been amazing to see.
I understand that the key reason for including this was to have a huge amount of guilt for the hero Alice. And we see this and it is powerful. But without being able to see the actual impact from the character affected it is two-dimensional.
Alice’s husband, John, comes across as heartless and self-serving. To start off with his reaction to the diagnosis is disbelief and refusal – which all makes sense. The problem is that he doesn’t move from this state to support Alice who is clearly moved beyond this.
In the end, John ends up leaving Alice in the care of one of their daughter’s saying: “You are a better man than me.” This is tried to be spun as financially important but this doesn’t hold true with their lavish lifestyle. Once again if we had been able to see more of John from John’s perspective this whole mini-arc could have been great.
The way that Alzheimer’s is revealed to us and Alice through everyday normal interactions is really well done. The point where she forgets where she is when she is out running is very powerful. We watch Alice decline to the point that she has to give up teaching. It’s heartbreaking to watch and the performance is spectacular.
Julianne Moore’s performance was stellar and she deserved the nomination if not the Oscar itself. I haven’t seen all the other films where the lead actress was nominated in 2015 but my pick would have been Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl. Also a much better film.
A really big flaw with having a character with Alzhiemer’s is that they loose agency throughout the story. This is a big problem for a normal narrative arc as the hero needs to drive the action and well before the end of the film Alice isn’t making any decisions at all.
They did start to set up something that looked like it was going to get around this problem in an exciting way. Alice began recording videos and leaving notes for herself. These were instructions for suicide once she couldn’t answer a set of questions. The problem here was twofold. The first was that it was only used in this one instance.
It would have been nice to see Alice try to hold onto some sort of control in other areas through these sorts of methods. The second was that Alice only didn’t follow through with the plan because she was interrupted while trying to follow the instructions in the video that she finds by mistake.
The sequence is really great but it could have been more powerful if Alice had been the one to finally decide on which way to go. Unsure how this fits with the diagnosis but it would have made a great scene.
The only child that we really get to see in any detail is Lydia. This is because the story uses this character as an adversary to Alice early on. The character then morphs into a test and then an ally.
The way this transition occurs is great as Lydia sees the impact of the disease on her mum. She is also left defending her mum’s rights against her family. She is interested in understanding where Alice is at as the disease progresses which also gives us greater insight.
