"Still Alice"

The final furlong of the Toronto film festival and, just as the delegates head home after 10 days through the emotional wringer, Julianne Moore bids them goodbye with a Glasgow kiss. To call Still Alice a weepy would be to underestimate the upset it elicits. It's a sucker-punch that smacks sufficiently hard you have trouble breathing. There were so many sniffles at my screening I suspect they're still mopping the floor.

Moore is Alice, a popular, much-respected 50-year-old linguistics professor at Columbia who lives happily with husband Alec Baldwin, also a neuro-specialist, of sorts. They've three grownup children – Kate Bosworth, Kristen Stewart, Hunter Parrish – and everything to look forward to. But small acts of forgetfulness lead her to seek medical help, fearing cancer. The diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's takes them both aback; likewise the news that it's genetic, and likely to be passed on to their children.

 

Film-makers Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, adapting the bestseller by Lisa Genova, then track the rapid progress of the disease and its fallout for the family, as some try to dodge responsibility, others to defeat the unbeatable. We stay close to Alice throughout; at times entering her vision - image blurred, context distorted, sound edit frightening - but mostly studying Moore's face as the light fades from it. You gain awful insight into a fate whose horrors its sufferer, for a while at least as she attempts to stymie the disease with word games and bright positivity, appreciates.

  

Glatzer and Washmoreland have teased one thread from the book further, brought it a touch more up to date (it's set a decade back). Just as Glatzer's own diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2011 has led him to speak only via an app, so too Alice's reliance on new technology impacts on her illness: after all, she has instant access to a bank of memories.

Might her smartphone use have even masked the depth of her memory loss? With neat little teases like these, the film's scope is expanded from the personal to the universal; even the dystopian. Alice uses her iPhone to write questions to herself which she must answer every morning, leading to scenes of pathos you didn't know autocomplete could manage.

It's not perfect – or, rather, it is a little too perfect. That Alice's profession concerns cognitive function over-eggs the pudding, adds to the unhappy sense that the tragedy of Alzheimer's is heightened when it hits an intellectual. Making the disease genetic as well as so early – and especially as Bosworth announces her intention to have a baby – also feels unnecessary. All you need is Moore; you don't need seven layers of irony to perk things up.

But it's hard to deny the flooring impact of that central performance; a word too for Kristen Stewart, initially bratty, but developing into something much subtler. Alice quotes Elizabeth Bishop's line: "The art of losing isn't hard to master". This is an effortlessly excellent film, about a horribly hard subject.

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The most intrepid scene in the gorgeous, piercing Still Alice is between Julianne Moore and herself.

The heroine of Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel is a linguistics professor, Dr Alice Howland, who must master what the poet Elizabeth Bishop called “the art of losing”. She’s diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Alice, who has reached the point of forgetting her children’s names and how to spell “October”, finds a video file on her laptop. She’s not meant to be watching it, or not yet: it’s supposed to be the last message she’ll ever see, when her mind has already deteriorated to a point past endurance. The person on the video is her earlier self – an Alice soon after diagnosis, in the controlled infancy of her illness.

On one level, this is a kind of trap Alice has laid, to bring on the end in the kindest way for her family. But it’s also a missive of caring and love from a person to her future self. Moore delivers it with consoling patience, as if addressing a child, and at the same time listens, with a trusting smile of befuddled self-recognition.

It’s perhaps the centrepiece moment of an astonishingly delicate and sad performance. To Moore’s precious gallery of portraits – the ailing, lost Carol White of Safe (1995), the strung-out Amber Waves of Boogie Nights (1997), the emotionally imprisoned Cathy Whitaker of Far From Heaven (2002) – Alice Howland must now be added.

Her close-ups are minutely calibrated, even by this actress’s celebrated, unshowy standards. The increments of the performance are tiny marvels. It’s these that make the precipitous then-and-now of this iBook face-off shattering to behold.

The film follows a very straight trajectory into this cruellest of all neurological disorders – rendered especially cruel when Alice, who has three children, finds out she has a rare, hereditary kind. There’s no messing around with fragmentary form, or the memory-as-puzzle-box gimmicks of which cinema can be over-fond, save for a few flickers of childhood home video footage on the beach.

Despite an overly insistent chamber-led score, it’s extremely moving in the gentlest, most linear way, and the other performances are sterling, too.

The bristling impatience of Alec Baldwin’s persona is ideally harnessed as John, Alice’s husband, whose scoffing denial of her initial diagnosis elicits lightning rage from his wife – she’s used to him not listening. Kate Bosworth, as their tightly-wound eldest daughter, and Kristen Stewart, as her sister Lydia, do lovely, complementary work.

Beyond memory loss, it’s a film whose subject is words – their meaning and function, everything they helplessly give away about the brain and its rebellions. The first one Alice forgets, at a lecture podium, is “lexicon”. She goes from a 66-point Words With Friends score, with a well-placed HADJ, to a shadow of the player she used to be, laying down TONE for a mere 6.

She tests herself, at first, chalking “cathode”, “pomegranate”, “trellis” on the kitchen board, and setting a timer to see if she can recall them. When Stewart's Lydia, months later, recites passages from Angels in America to her mother, they have become mere sounds, but she’s still able to recognise them as sounds conveying something to do with love.

Directing here, and doing their best work ever, is the married team of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, for whom this project is especially personal: Glatzer suffers from a related neurodegenerative ailment, ALS, and was unable to come to this Toronto premiere.

Their film will mean a lot to a lot of people – not just anyone whose life Alzheimer’s has affected, but anyone whom it could affect, ever. Working with the magisterial French cameraman Denis Lenoir (Carlos), they get every shot to take its still, measured toll
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