OVP: Still Alice (2014)

Film: Still Alice (2014)
Stars: Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish
Director: Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Actress-Julianne Moore*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Considering that Julianne Moore has won everything but the Heisman, it seems prudent to get to her latest film on the blog, since I'm expecting she's about to have a dream come true on February 22nd.  I hit her film as part of a massive trip to the movies this past weekend (which included my first triple feature of the year!), and like what many people are saying about the film, left duly impressed by Julianne Moore, but a little underwhelmed by the actual motion picture that's housing her fifth Oscar-nominated performance (and potentially her first win).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Alice Howland (Moore), a woman who is living a Nancy Meyers-style lifestyle in Manhattan.  She has the swanky job at Columbia as a linguistics professor and a trio of children so beautiful their parents could only be Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore.  And she manages to be that sort of person we all aspire toward being: confident, learned, cultured, and yet somehow down-to-earth.  She's a truly remarkable woman reaping the fruits of decades of hard work.

And yet, right around her fiftieth birthday, we see that she's starting to forget things.  A woman of great intellect, she rationalizes and tests herself before finally learning that she has an extremely rare form of Alzheimer's disease, which has presented when she is still medically young.  Alice must not only cope with this loss of her mind, which is her shining star as a human being, but with the slow deterioration of the relationships she has with her husband and children.  Along the way we see the ugliness of not just disease, but also how people treat those they love who have a disease, and the way that we approach different illnesses.

There's a lot to discuss out of the film, particularly that it shows the really horrific effects of Alzheimer's because it's ravaging our mind, not our body.  There's a moment where Alice talks about how she wishes that she'd had cancer, because at least that's something that people understand how to sympathize with, and there's so much logic in that opinion, and it opens up a larger conversation about how we have a hierarchy of empathy for different diseases.  Just think of how, say, AIDS or Type-2 Diabetes are treated compared to breast cancer, or how, Alzheimer's, a disease that's a shot in the dark in terms of whether you get it, is handled with kid's gloves.  We see how people try to talk around Alice, assuming that whatever pops out of her mind is madness even when it isn't, and how even the most beloved of people become a burden when they don't jive with our own lives.

This last point may be the weakest aspect of the film, as both Kate Bosworth and Alec Baldwin play characters who are unrealistically cruel to Alice and her situation.  Baldwin clearly adores his wife at the beginning of the movie, and Bosworth is constantly communicating with her role model of a mother.  And yet by the end of the film, conveniently, it's the rebel of the family (Kristen Stewart) who ends up being the only one who can still connect with her mother.  It doesn't help with Baldwin's casting in particular that he's far too famous and far too defined of a public persona for the role; we all know that Alec Baldwin the person has a tendency to be callous and a bully, so it's easy to confuse his change in behavior with his public persona in a way that, say, Richard Jenkins or Dennis Quaid wouldn't have been so easily dismissed.

The film also keeps to a fairly predictable beat-there's nothing surprising about the eventual decline of Alice or about her family's relationships, and while the acting from Moore and Stewart is worth the price of admission, it's a pretty blank slate.  This helps while you're actually in the theater, principally because you can easily project on these fairly non-descript individuals your own fears and insecurities.  I spoke with my brother afterwards, and both of us sort of acknowledged that we are the same ages as Kate Bosworth and Hunter Parrish, respectively, and that our parents are roughly the same ages as Moore and Baldwin, and how that factor fed more into the tears than anything else (the "thereby the grace of God" sort of feeling).  Even if you aren't the same age as the children, you can still see yourself in Moore's or Baldwin's shoes as a spouse or a sibling or a child and seeing how that deterioration is petrifying.  This makes the film extremely effective in the moment, but as you leave the theater you realize that there's not enough to connect with these people onscreen, and not all the great acting in the world is going to make up for the fact that the script is very underwritten.

Those are my thoughts on this tough-sit of a movie that has been rocking the Best Actress prizes-what are yours?  Are you rooting for Juli on Oscar night, or do you have a Team Reese or Team Marion shirt lined up?  And what do you think of great performances lodged in lousy movies in general-do you find that with time the performance makes up for the poorness of the film, or does the lack of quality in the movie hurt your opinion of the film over time?  It's a thought worth discussing, and, in particular, sharing in the comments!