Still Alice * * *

Sorry, I can’t seem to recall what this was about. Gee I wonder how many reviews of this film have started off with that smart-arse line?   Probably not many.  Welcome to flippant film thoughts.  

Alzheimer's is a pretty horrible condition that affects thousands of people and their families.  It’s not pretty, so to make an attractive film on it is a challenge. However Still Alice IS pretty: and to be honest that was the one thing that bugged me about it. Alice is gorgeous, her husband is handsome, their relationship is healthy and mutually supportive, their healthy successful kids all look like they could be models. Their house is beautiful (and so is the other one down by the beach).  Their jobs are respectful and well paid, their positions are enviable, their minds are brilliant, their friends are plentiful etc.  In the end I thought “Very good, now shoot it again featuring a penniless family who live on the wrong side of the track, then we’ll really see the pain of Mum or Dad getting Alzheimer's.  But no, they're not going to do that, because a Dad in overalls, or a suburban Mum in an apron getting Alzheimers doesn't convey the same tragedy as a beautiful successful woman.  Who cares about a coffee mug getting chipped as opposed to a porcelain vase?

Having said that, Julianne Moore's performance as Alice is pretty incredible. You can literally see the light fading in her eyes.  She is a successful university professor specialising in linguistics when she discovers her condition. The film is about her family's acceptance of it. What else can they do?  The means of showing her decline range from the dubious to the brilliantly simple (forgetting she met someone minutes after meeting them), to the manipulative.  They take us to the point where she'd forget where the toilet is and wet herself, lose her phone, need help getting dressed, then months later - for the convenience of plot - we see her skype with her daughter and pull up files on her computer that she’d previously recorded. Probably the most moving part was the relationship that rebuilds between Alice and her youngest daughter - the disappointing one that didn't want to go to college.

But even with its salubrious background we should be glad that they have made a serious drama on something as unromantic as Alzheimers, made it respectfully, and from the accolades it has received, made it in a way that most people have found informative, thought provoking and affecting.