Still Alice

Dir: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland

2015

**

For all the hype surrounding Still Alice, I thought I was in for a treat but when the end credits rolled up the screen I was left baffled as to why it has been regarded so highly? It is great that Hollywood is tackling subjects such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease but these conditions deserve better representation than this. Julianne Moore is a phenomenal actor but I didn't think her performance was as outstanding as I'd heard. She deserved to win best actress at the 68th Academy awards but not for Alice but for Maps to the Stars. At times her performance seemed forced and dare I say, a little over the top. There were a couple of scenes that were clearly intended to be the films big guns but I'm afraid I got nothing from them. There is a scene whereby Alice forgets where the bathroom in her own house is and unfortunately wets herself. This scene is handled with very little emotion, especially when you compare it to the very similar scene seen in Julie Walters' 2010 film Mo. I don't blame Julianne Moore entirely for this, to be honest she probably comes across as over-acting due to the complete lack of emotion her co-stars emit. Alec Baldwin's performance is one of the most lethargic I have ever seen. The lassitude in his performance made me care even less so for the characters, I was never once convinced they were a loving couple, that they had been together for years, that their children were theirs or that they gave a flying toss about each other. Kristen Stewart and Kate Bosworth couldn't have been more horrible in their ying vs yang roles if they'd tried. Kate Bosworth's performance as the rather cold, judgmental and rather insensitive older sibling is so convincing, I'm not altogether convinced she was acting. Her performance is one of a forced stereotype, a good actor would have rectified this. Kristen Stewart's performance style seems to come straight from the 'Smell the fart' school of method acting, as she merely juggles her thick brows over those big dead eyes of hers and occasionally flicks the hair out of her face. Watching her act at acting (her character is an actress) was one of the most painful things I have ever witnessed, totally distracting away from the poignancy of the scene, whereby Alice congratulates her on the play she’s just performed in, not realizing she is her own daughter. Is it poor acting or is it poor direction, I'd say a little bit of both. Award bait, and it looks like people swallowed it hook, line and sinker. The sad thing is that dementia and Alzheimer's disease is nothing like how it is portrayed here. It is a brutal disease that could only be done justice with a brutally real movie and this just isn't it. Passionless and misguided. Very few people who I've spoken to about the film agree with me about this, with the few that do being the only ones who have had to care for or have been close to an Alzheimer's sufferer.