Whom does Julianne Moore in Still Alice remind me of? That nose, the way the eyes look away and the voice rises to a peculiar off-putting giggle, especially when she gets nervous? Yes, the actress in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Now what was her name?
That I couldn’t summon up Diane Keaton’s name from memory by the end of Still Alice, the heartbreaking film starring Moore about the effects of Alzheimer’s disease on a Columbia University linguistics professor and her family, is perhaps a very bad sign. (The film is playing at New Haven’s Cine 1 – 2‑3 – 4 on Middletown Avenue as well as the downtown Criterion Bow-Tie Cinemas.)
Moore’s performance deserves the Best Actress nomination she received. Problem is, if Still Alice were a better film, I wouldn’t have had my personal little anxiety attack. During all of Still Alice’s 99 minutes, what assailed was low-grade and irritating anxiety about my own potential memory loss. What should have gripped is the deeper, less egoistic, more empathetic pleasures that come from better storytelling.
If art can’t take you out of your own life and into another’s, however briefly, what’s it for?
The problem isn’t that film is a dicey medium for portraying illness. Quite the opposite: Its flexibility and unique capacity to move quickly and convincingly through years make portraying a disease’s progress, especially chronic conditions, far easier than it is on the stage. Take the 1942 classic Pride of the Yankees, in which Gary Cooper gives a noble performance as the great ballplayer Lou Gehrig, felled by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
The difference between Sam Wood’s sentimental biopic and Still Alice, directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland and based on Lisa Genova’s novel, is that by the time Gehrig has so much trouble grasping his bat that he asks to be removed from a game after a record-setting run of 2,130 plus consecutive appearances, we love the guy.
We’ve seen him as a kid playing stickball on the street. We’ve seen him battle his imposing mom, who wants him to be an engineer like Uncle Otto. We’ve seen him humiliated by the waspy swells he has to serve at the Columbia fraternity where he’s pledging.
When Still Alice opens, Julianne Moore is at Columbia as well, as a distinguished professor. But unlike Pride of the Yankees, which spends 90 percent of its time on getting us to know and love Gehrig before showing how he succumbs to ALS, Still Alice has Moore’s professor forgetting words during lectures right from the film’s get-go.
We see her family, including her scientist husband Alec Baldwin, rally around her. The three kids in their different manners come in alarmed to help. But we’ve seen so little about who Alice was, what she struggled against to get where she is, that — frankly, and sadly — it’s harder to care a whole lot about her. The past is conveyed in flashbacks that she has as the disease progresses, and in labored conversations in which the parents talk to the kids.
Especially distressing as a missed dramatic opportunity, the film makes little, when it should make much, of the fact that Alice’s Alzheimer’s is genetic; she has passed the disease on to some of her children, and then they to their children. The family meeting where this is discussed seems by the numbers, even as everybody tears up and apologizes to each other.
Alice is, alas, more patient than person — which is precisely, I presume, the point the movie wants to disprove, debunk, chase away.
The distancing effect is made worse by the fact that the professor’s and her family’s life is just so, well, perfect. In their beautiful brownstone house, each hanging copper pot in the kitchen is polished to perfection. In their weekend house’s wood beams, on the private beach where the professor and her husband sit, they listen to the rolling waves and remember the sex they had there when they were both young professors driven to success.
The production design — with too much product placement — also added to the distancing effect, so that, despite the occasional tears and the swelling violin music, I felt as if I were not drawn into her story but her decline. And that’s a crucial difference.
After the movie, the young woman cleaning the popcorn from the aisles asked me what I thought of it. I surprised myself by answering, “I felt icky.” We chatted and she said she was surprised. I was the first person of the many she had talked to offering a negative opinion.
I realized, as we chatted on, that I really had felt like a voyeur. I had felt almost guilty dropping in on the life of this family. The film had given me no aesthetic right to be there.
The perfect design, the production values, it dawned on me, shared the visual and aural qualities of late-night TV advertisements directed at senior citizens for pharmaceuticals that hold out hope to manage diseases for which there are no cures. But take these medicines, they suggest, and you too can walk on the beach, watch the gulls circle overhead, and still have hope.
I don’t mean to belittle the horribleness of Alzheimer’s. But when Alice undergoes her neurologist’s memory test, should I be taking it along with her?
