Julianne Moore looks like a mortal lock to pick up an Oscar next week for her performance in Still Alice, an honor that she should have won years ago. I yield to no one in my admiration for this actress, yet I find myself curiously indifferent to the film she’s going to win it for. She does give a technically adroit performance, but her work is still well short of her best, largely because the overly cozy drama around her doesn’t let her do anything more.
She plays Dr. Alice Howland, a Columbia University linguistics professor who, soon after her 50th birthday, forgets a word that she needs while giving a guest lecture at UCLA. Then back home, she goes for a jog around Columbia’s campus and realizes that she doesn’t know where she is. The diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease follows, and the movie documents her rapid mental deterioration from there.
That’s it, really. We know there won’t be some miracle cure for Alice, so all that writer-directors (and offscreen married couple) Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland can do is bear witness as this woman who has relied so heavily on her brain grapples with its betrayal. “I wish I had cancer,” she says early on, meaning it. “I wouldn’t be so ashamed.”
The film is adapted from Lisa Genova’s novel, and Glatzer and Westmoreland fail to bring the same hawk-eyed detail to the material that Michael Haneke brought to his similar, far superior film Amour. They’re too decorous even to capture the anger and self-pity that Alzheimer’s patients are prone to, which renders Alice’s plight merely pathetic instead of tragic.
Nor can they find any larger meaning in Alice’s doomed struggle to keep hold of her mental capabilities. Their best opportunity to give their movie an emotional hook is in the subplot in which Alice tries to reconcile with her youngest daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart), who’s pursuing an acting career in Hollywood when the rest of the family are doctors and lawyers on the East Coast. The filmmakers fumble it, and in the process they waste a terrific backstage scene when Alice compliments Lydia post-show on her performance in a stage production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, and the daughter realizes that her mother doesn’t recognize her.
Moore captures the stages of Alice’s decline very well, but that’s all she’s allowed to do. She never comes close to the awe-inspiring greatness that she achieved in Safe, Boogie Nights, Far From Heaven, or The Kids Are All Right. Actually, forget those. She’s done deeper, more complex work in thoughtful generic fare like Chloe, Don Jon, and the Carrie remake than she does here. Moore will hardly be the first actor to win an Oscar as a de facto lifetime achievement award, but her win will memorialize a film and a performance that hardly deserve it.
[box_info]Still Alice
Starring Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart. Written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, based on Lisa Genova’s novel. Rated PG-13.[/box_info]
