Still Alice review – moving meditation on who we really are

This inexpressibly painful and sad film from Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer is about a woman who declines steeply into early-onset Alzheimer’s just after her 50th birthday, and somehow becomes a ghost haunting her own life.

It features a queenly, poignant and much-garlanded lead performance from Julianne Moore as linguistics professor Alice Howland. She begins the movie at the triumphant height of her career, enjoying a happy life with her husband John (Alec Baldwin), prosperous empty-nesters in a sumptuous New York home. They have three lovely grownup children: Tom (Hunter Parrish), Anna (Kate Bosworth) and Lydia (Kristen Stewart). The only problem in Alice’s life appears to be her strained relationship with Lydia, who has rejected college to be a struggling actor in Los Angeles.

 With a terrible, almost Nabokovian irony, Alice’s dementia begins with her inability to remember the word ‘lexicon’ while giving a lecture, although Westmoreland and Glatzer show how the condition has a kind of prehistorical moment at her birthday dinner the night before, when Alice overhears her son-in-law talk about “sisters” arguing and for some reason thinks he must be talking about her relationship with her own sister, who died in a car crash when they were teenagers. As her disease advances, Alice is lost in thought about this dead sister. The terrible diagnosis arrives, and I defy any audience in the world not to strain frantically to complete the memory test that a doctor gives Alice in one heartwrenching scene. There are, moreover, terrible genetic implications to her condition.

Still Alice is perhaps a relatively straightforward film on this subject, compared with, say, Sarah Polley’s Away From Her (2006) in which Julie Christie’s Alzheimer patient forms a relationship with another man in a care home, or Richard Eyre’s Iris (2001) in which Iris Murdoch, played by Judi Dench, descends into dementia in a kind of flashback parallel with the story of her younger self. There is admittedly something of the TV movie of the week in Still Alice, a little like Do You Remember Love, from 1985, starring Joanne Woodward.

Alice’s wealth admittedly makes palliative care an awful lot easier than for others less well off: the comfortable family set up, and Baldwin’s presence as the husband sometimes makes this film look weirdly like a very dark version of Nancy Meyers’s comfort-food relationship comedy It’s Complicated. Yet Moore’s heartfelt and self-possessed performance, as taut as a violin string, makes this a commanding film. It also boasts one truly sensational scene in which scared and bewildered Alice comes across a video message to herself: this is a flash of macabre ingenuity, as suspenseful as any thriller.

The crisis is all there in the title. Is she “still Alice”? Despite all the agony, the fear and the indignity of Alzheimer’s, is there some unbreachable core of identity that will remain? Or is Alice’s self utterly eroded, reduced to a set of symptoms?

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/05/still-alice-julianne-moore-oscar-alzheimers

1.      inexpressibly 說不出

2.     poignant 淒美

3.     sumptuous 豪華

4.     palliative 姑息

5.     taut 拉緊的

6.     bewildered 不知所措