- Still Alice
The ads for Still Alice (which is currently playing around town) make it seem less like a film and more like part of a PR campaign to win Julianne Moore an Oscar. Having seen it, I’d say that’s a fair representation. Alice often calls upon Moore to illustrate some symptom of Alzheimer’s disease or to remind us of the character’s integrity in the face of suffering. Moore performs these things with the care and consideration you’d expect from an actress of her caliber, but the film gives us little to consider beyond her performance and the basic facts of Alzheimer’s disease. Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer, who wrote and directed, grant each of the supporting characters just one or two distinctive traits, if that. Their direction is competent but never visually compelling, the pacing is flaccid, and the storytelling is unadorned. Moore’s technical accomplishment is the constant center of attention, and this ultimately distracts from the filmmakers’ obvious sincerity in raising awareness of Alzheimer’s disease.
Moore’s played her share of mistresses and housewives (in Surviving Picasso; Magnolia; The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio; and most of the other films cited in this paragraph), but when she has, she’s always underscored the character’s basic intelligence and potential for deep feeling. In Grace and Atom Egoyan’s Chloe, she inverts this dynamic to fascinating effect, playing posh, socially accomplished women who are more vulnerable and messed up than they know.
