In Still Alice, a linguistics professor starts losing her grasp of language, bearing and memory. Alice (Julianne Moore) is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, and for a person whose lifelong devotion is to words and what words can do, the disease is an existential coup. This tender, warmly-lit and empathetic film is billed as a family drama. It's also a horror story, one in which the demon inside Alice can never be defeated.
Moore is tipped to win an Oscar for her delicate performance here as a strong woman struggling not to be reduced to pity. A versatile actress (she was recently in the camp epic fantasy Seventh Son), Moore's gift is to make her technique feel less visible — and to some, less impressive, or less of a showboat — than, say, Meryl Streep, whose perfection is meticulously calibrated. If Moore actually wins an Oscar, which I believe she will, she'll score two estimable trophies that testify to her range. Last year the actress was also in the sinister Hollywood satire Maps To The Stars (released here though no one went to see it), playing a half-demented, wholly hysterical ageing star fighting to get a role in a movie. Moore won Best Actress at Cannes Film Festival from that film.
In Still Alice, Moore is the emotional core, a bright ember whose glow is fast diminishing. But let's not forget another performance that comes as a surprise here: Kristen Stewart, from Twilight fame, plays Lydia, one of Alice's daughters — the college dropout one who often spars with her academic mother about life choice.
Stewart has only a few scenes, most of them opposite Moore, and the young actress who was once subjected to much ridicule early in her career has proved her maturity. Her final scene, again with Moore, nails the pathos and humanity that makes this potentially sappy material a genuinely mournful film about life lived and lost.
