Review: Still Alice
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
"I feel like my fucking brain is dying."
City Paper grade: C+
"I feel like my fucking brain is dying," laments Julianne Moore's linguistics professor, stricken with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's. At some point in Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's movie, you will feel similarly. There's not much to fault in Moore's performance of a woman whose intellect is gradually fading like chalk in a rainstorm, but Glatzer and Westmoreland are stolid-at-best filmmakers and far worse writers; the closing scene in which one character asks another "What's it about?" may be the clumsiest in the history of recorded drama. Alec Baldwin has the thankless and ill-defined role of Moore's husband, a high-powered doctor who battens down the hatches rather than facing his wife's deterioration, but Kristen Stewart invests the part of her youngest daughter with more feeling than it deserves. (With this and Clouds of Sils Maria, she's giving some of her best performances playing not-so-great actresses.) In its most poignant moments, Still Alice hands off the emotional heavy lifting to quotations from Elizabeth Browning and Angels in America, betraying a lack of confidence in Glatzer and Westmoreland's skill to manufacture their own drama that sadly proves entirely well-founded.
