Still Alice

In a blog post last year I mentioned that I'd the read the book Still Alice and something of the impact it had had on me.  So it was a given that I'd want to see the movie adaptation, if only out of curiosity to see how the story would be handled.  In general I find 'the film of the book' is often a second best form of entertainment, yet will maybe add some extra visual factor that would be hard to realise on paper.  But there was some reassurance from learning that the eponymous central role would be played by the great Julianne Moore.

Alice Howland is a highly regarded professor of linguistics who finds herself becoming more and more forgetful and is then diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's.  The story charts the progress of the disease and its effects on the lives of Alice and the members of her close family.

Much of the book explores Alice's mental cognitive deterioration through her own internal monologues.  Thankfully the director chose to reject the easy option of using voiceovers to replicate this.  So the onus for conveying how Alice sees the world rests almost entirely on Moore's acting skills.  Nobody should be quibbling over her Best Actress Oscar for the performance.  Her facial expressions, intonation and body language give us the fear, anger, frustration, confusion and, most critically, loss of self that the condition brings with it.  And the humour, for there are several moments when it's impossible not to laugh at the conflicts of understanding that arise, or the self awareness of the faux pas committed.  If I had one criticism it would be that in delivering her speech to the Alzheimer's Association she seemed almost too fluent, too able to speak without constantly looking down at her text.  But that did nothing to dim the emotion of the scene.  Moore has great support on screen, with Alec Baldwin superb as the husband who has own range of emotions and reactions to deal with, watching the person he loves and knows so well losing their own sense of themselves.

Spoiler alert for this paragraph.  In my memory there were two passages from the book that have always remained with me.  One was right at the end when Alice describes her husband as "the man who owned the house", a line that,sadly, had to be left out of the film script.  The other was the pivotal moment when Alice finds a message from herself, recorded when she was still in reasonable control of her memories, giving her instructions on how to take an overdose.  A simple scene in the novel was ramped up into a stronger visual episode on screen and was the better for it.

Moore reminds us that no matter whatever happens to her character's internal world she remains still Alice.  Highly recommended.