STILL ALICE by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland

Still Alice offers a frightening and honest depiction of a woman's life relentlessly crumbling as she gradually gives into the grip of Alzheimer's disease.
 
American film has a long history of dealing with diseases and disabilities in an overtly melodramatic way. Which is why Still Alice, with its disharming honesty and humanity comes across as being all the more powerful and remarkable. Still Alice follows the life of a woman diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. When we first meet her, she comes across as a happy family woman, with grown up children, full of household pride and enjoying a fulfilling career as a Columbia linguistics professor. As merciless fate has it, she begins to succomb to a feelings of disorientation and furgetfulness. Soon enough, the diagnosis comes in and her sorry destiny is revealed quite plainly to her.
 
Based on a Lisa Genova novel by the same name, the film also benefits from a number of elements that affected the production positively. Not least of all, the personal nature of the film that comes from the co-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland themselves, who also wrote the screenplay. They are going through a similar experience in real life themselves, as a real life couple and with Glatzer fighting his own battle with ALS. That is perhaps also why the two are always quite careful in dosing the drama, whilst retaining a type of immediate and somewhat unpredictable tension, especially as the leading female character's disease begins to show more prominently in her everyday life.
Equally as powerful is Julienne Moore in the leading role, who delivers one of her greatest performances to date, for which she rightfully won an Academy Award. The narrative revolves around her, and it is legitimately her performance that seems to dictate most of all the tension in each individual scenes, whether it is in her sudden lost gazes at the dinner table, or whether it is her outbursts as she finds herself roaming mysterious rooms in the house. 
 
Much like Amour by Haneke in fact, it is not only the characters in Still Alice that construct the power of the narrative. Glatzer and Westmoreland also pay careful attention to an accentuation of the domestic in the term domestic drama, by allowing the viewer to familiarise with the seaside home in which most of the film takes place. The open rooms and somewhat sparse modern furniture add a sense of disorientation that can be fully undersood. But it is also a house full of memories, a house that slowly crumbles under the force of the inevitability of life. 
 
Alec Baldwin, whose chemistry with Moore was proved in the past, also delivers strong support as the sympathetic other half who cannot stand to see the glow her lifelong lover's face begin to fade. The tenderness and closeness of the pivotal couple is very realistic, unembellished and yet full of warmth. Shaky work, however, comes from Kristen Stewart, who is herself unable to sway away from her awkward teenager diction, which shows in an awful theatre acting sequence - herself playing a struggling actress - and ending the movie with a lukewarm delivery in a final monologue.