Still Alice showcases an empathetic Julianne Moore, but for those who know the reality of Alzheimer’s, the film falls short.
by Candace Mittel
“I wish I had cancer,” whispers a frightened, painfully candid Alice Howland played by the predictably marvelous Julianne Moore. In the poignant drama Still Alice, based on the 2007 novel by Lisa Genova, Alice has just found out that at the ripe age of 50, and in the middle of a prestigious career as a linguistics professor at Columbia, she has early onset Alzheimer’s disease.
What could be more harrowing than a scholar losing the very thing she studies—words? Or you might say, as some critics do, that it’s just “cheap irony” unworthy of Moore’s time or talent. Either way, the particular situation allows for a more percipient glimpse into a baffling disease whose true effects doctors do not yet understand. Indeed, this was one of Genova’s goals in writing Still Alice. Genova, who has a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard, tried to read and research all about Alzheimer’s when her grandmother was diagnosed with the disease but wasn’t satisfied with the available literature: “I found what was lacking is an understanding of what it feels like to have it,” she told CBS News. So she created Alice, a carefully crafted character who can intellectually and artfully articulate the experience of Alzheimer’s, give us an insider’s look.
This is, perhaps, the movie’s greatest feat: an attempt at empathy. Whether the movie succeeds is up for debate. Calculated camera effects—the blurring out of Alice’s surroundings during moments of loss and confusion, for example—fell just short of cheesy, as were the recurring and anti-climactic home-movie flashbacks of Alice as a child on the beach with a melodramatic musical accompaniment.
Fortunately, Moore’s performance throughout was exquisite, her naturalistic portrayal of Alice outstandingly heartbreaking. Alice’s speech, for example, at an Alzheimer’s Association gathering, in which she describes, with a great deal of struggle (highlighting each word as she goes along so as not to repeat the same sentence over and over again), the experience of living with Alzheimer’s, her attempt to embrace “the art of losing” and live in the moment, brought me to tears. This is not to suggest that what produces emotion necessarily prompts empathy, but rather to show that the movie did, indeed, make me feel things, despite undue violins and Pinkberry marketing (not to mention an insane close-up of popping boba and Fruity Pebbles, arguably a metaphor for Alice’s inability to perceive things as they really are but to me, a distracting and unexplained shot seemingly through the lens of a kaleidoscope).
The film was particularly evocative for me, having recently lost a real-life Alice. My grandmother passed away from Alzheimer’s disease last month, and I know the terrors of the disease all too well, most of which the movie skimmed over (at least the later stages, which include complete loss of speech, mobility and the inability to eat or swallow). The few horrific scenes the film did portray of Alice (smearing toothpaste on the mirror; complimenting an actress’s performance backstage, unaware that the actress is her daughter; getting lost at her beach house, unable to find the bathroom) only gave a small taste of the terrible suffering that is the daily reality of those living with this irreversible, destructive disease.
Although no one really knows what it’s like to live without memory and thinking skills, I can only imagine the worst. My father reflected furiously about his mother’s deteriorating state before she passed. He wrote in his notes: “Who could have invented a more indecent affliction, a disease that insidiously steals from you every memory that defines your dignity? It’s doubly insulting too, especially in the late stages. You lose the capacity to do everyday tasks that define your civility like bathing, dressing, and eating. Incontinence? How antiseptic a word for something so foul. Dementia even robs you of the ability to remember the need to go. So you leak piss and shit every time you eat, if you can remember what’s it’s like to be hungry, but you can’t so you take yet another pill to stimulate your appetite. Then the second punch to the face, the knockout blow, maybe, staggering, the referee spouting off a standing eight count, the disease takes from you the ability to even appreciate the concept of dignity, leaving in its wake an angry, frustrated soul until even those emotions get stripped away and what remains is a biologically functioning but empty shell, the match ends, the fight over, the winner never in doubt.”
If there was anything missing from the film, then it’s what my father said. No, I don’t mean a scene of Moore shitting herself, but rather the enraged, distressed, helpless son. You often hear that Alzheimer’s is harder on the family members than it is on the sickly patient. Because who you once knew is gone, has dissolved before you, and all you’re left with is this familiar shell of a human, your human, who you still care for and desperately want to interact with in some meaningful way, and it can be intolerable.
Kristen Stewart as Alice’s youngest daughter Lydia was the best attempt to capture the real thing, the emotionally responsive daughter. Lydia is the rebellious girl turned likable when her mom gets sick type of character, which actually works in the film’s favor (plus Stewart’s acting is authentic and golden). However, the rest of Alice’s family (a dull and unnatural Kate Bosworth as Alice’s oldest daughter, Hunter Parrish as Alice’s son, and an unsurprising Alec Baldwin as Alice’s self-seeking research scientist husband) come across as unrealistically cold, selfish and even apathetic participants in their mother’s/wife’s dying.
Which is why so many critics describe Still Alice as feeling “pretty thin on the whole,” or “timid and Hallmark-ish.” The film glides gently over surfaces when we know that the truth is thorny and mucky, and even a stellar Julianne Moore cannot save the film from leaving its audience having wanted something more.
In an interview with NPR, Moore explains how playing Alice affected her thinking about aging: “You value the present. I think you’re never, never more in love with life than you are in the presence of death or your own mortality… you think about how much you love to live, how much you love the people you love… what do you value? Who do you value? What do you want to do? In a sense, it makes everything kind of crisper, and sharper and more vital.”
Funny, right? An actress portraying a woman whose world is becoming ever more unidentifiable and fuzzy declares her biggest takeaway is about life coming into focus. Indeed, some of what I learned from my grandmother as I watched her age, before and after she developed Alzheimer’s, is precisely what Moore describes. My grandmother had certain eccentric habits I remember. She essentially ran a full-blown candy story out of her small kitchen—I’m talking everything, from Gushers to Milano cookies, and what couldn’t fit on shelves and in drawers went in the oven; she diligently kept score of every Braves’ game from 1990-2010 using her own unique scoring system (smiley faces included) and gladly declared her love for the sexy David Justice; she grew a beautifully wild and radiant botanical garden on her front lawn despite condominium rules to have uniform green grass; she volunteered behind the front desk of my school twice a week for 14 years (probably just to sneak me candy every morning); she cursed proudly, laughed unreservedly, sang loudly. I now know that these quirks and manners were my grandmother’s expression of loving life and living it in the given moment. Perhaps she lived life this way because she had early insight into the presence of death even though, at that time, it wasn’t near.
In her later stages, my grandmother lost the ability to speak. She tried to say sentences but the words came out jumbled and unintelligible. It’s as if the words were dangling in front of her, but the brain couldn’t remember how to string together the syllables. Alice perceptively describes a very similar sensation (when she could still talk and “pass as a normal person”) after her daughter Lydia asks, “what is it like? I mean, what does it actually feel like?” Alice responds: “On my bad days, I feel like I can’t find myself… sometimes I can see the words hanging in front of me, and I can’t reach them, and I don’t know who I am, and I don’t know what I’m going to lose next.” A weighty silence, the two facing each other in dread and sorrow, before Lydia is finally able to muster a “that sounds horrible.” She clearly doesn’t know what else to say.
Horrible, indeed. But instead of getting angry with herself or flustered about the missing word, my grandmother would just laugh. And then we would laugh, too, because what else is there to do? She always laughed. In spite of everything, all that my grandmother had gone through, all that is unfair, she still would laugh. As my dad theorized, perhaps it was her way of dominating, if ever so briefly, the disease that eventually killed her on December 5, 2014.
“Such a simple yet seemingly impossible thing,” my dad commented, “the ability to find humor and wit where it appears it cannot conceivably exist.” She mastered what Alice calls “the art of losing.” Living in the present moment. Alice tells us it’s simply a matter of survival, and perhaps my grandmother would have said the same: “It’s the only thing I can do.”
(photo courtesy of Sony Classics)
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Candace Mittel is a recent graduate of Northwestern University where she studied Mathematics, Jewish Studies and Creative Writing Nonfiction (and no, they are not connected, but she’s open to suggestions). She currently lives in Chicago and teaches/encourages students to love math. Candace enjoys listening/singing to the Les Mis soundtrack and eating a superbly ripe avocado or mango. Read more of her feature work for The Riveter here and see more of her writing on her website Jerusalem Medley.
