Sometimes science fact is scarier than science fiction. “Still Alice” (opening Friday at Landmark's Hillcrest Cinemas and Arclight La Jolla) looks to the terrifying reality of Alzheimer’s.
Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a linguistics professor whose sudden memory losses prompt her to see a neurologist. Then she has to break the news to her disbelieving husband (Alec Baldwin) that she’s suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s.
"I know what I’m feeling, it feels like my f-cking brain is dying and everything I’ve worked for in my entire life is going," Alice says in the film.
Julianne Moore has won a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her performance as Alice. She conveys the panic as well as the occasional thoughtful insight about her devastating disease.
In a scene with her youngest daughter (Kristen Stewart), Alice explains, "I have always been so defined by my intellect, my language, my intellect, and now 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."
Now that's true horror, far worse than anything Freddy or Jason can threaten you with. Moore displays subtlety even when the film and the script do not. The filmmakers have Alice suffer from a rare kind of Alzheimer’s that has a rapid onset. This allows them to milk an inherently dramatic and compelling situation for maudlin melodrama.
Despite Moore’s fine work, "Still Alice" (rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, and brief language including a sexual reference) comes across as one of those old made-for-TV, disease of the week movies. I would instead suggest "Away from Her" with a radiant Julie Christie or "The Taking of Deborah Logan," a found footage horror film, as more effective and creative approaches.
