Still Alice

  In Still Alice, Julianne Moore triumphs in a role that would be tempting to write off as a pointed Oscar grab. Moore’s performance—as Alice Howland, a successful linguistics professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease—is haunting and complex, showing us the progression of a disease in a very believable way without sacrificing the dignity of her character. Still Alice might have been the kind of middlebrow message movie that the Oscars delight in, except for the fact that its treatment of Alzheimer’s disease is raw and authentic. The movie doesn’t strain for prestige as much as we might expect. Instead, it weaves compelling scenes together of Alice the successful intellectual (author of noteworthy books on language development), Alice the happy wife (married to a fellow academic, played by Alec Baldwin), and Alice the mother of three grown children (played by Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish, and Kristen Stewart), who struggles with a disease but is not defined by it.

     If we have to sit through a movie as depressing as Still Alice, I’m glad we can do it in the company of the great Julianne Moore. (Granted, I’m biased. She is one of my favorite actresses, and I was more than a little adamant that she deserved an Oscar for this performance even before I saw the movie.) And yes, Still Alice is a tough movie to watch. Few films released in 2014 so boldly stared viewers in the face with their own mortality. How many of us have loved ones who struggle with this and other diseases which seemingly erase their personalities, taking them from us long before their bodies give out?

    The writing-directing team of Still Alice, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (who adapted Lisa Genova’s novel of the same name), understand how to make a movie about human suffering and frailty without giving in to the temptation to preach or pander. Of course, viewers are likely to experience a “Niagara Falls” kind of emotional reaction to this movie anyway. This is a movie that will break your heart, not the least of which because it feels like we’re watching Julianne Moore develop Alzheimer’s. That is probably the hardest thing to take: seeing an actor you love suffer on the screen in such an urgent and real way. But because Still Alice is honest, and because its emotional wallops are never cheaply constructed, its melodramatic content works beautifully, the way tearjerkers should.  

    Emotions are such tricky things, and Hollywood movies so often falter when they try to dramatize the real emotions people feel. Still Alice gets at the complexity of those emotions for all the members of Alice’s family. We see the panic in Alice’s children when they are confronted with her disease; we see the denial and cowardice (and self-loathing) of her husband, who at the beginning assures Alice that he will stand by her, never believing just how costly this struggle will be; we see Alice, bravely speaking about her illness at an Alzheimer’s convention, using a highlighter to follow the lines of her speech. (In a prior scene, her youngest daughter, an aspiring actress living in L.A. who’s played by Kristen Stewart, suggests—via Skype—that her mom’s speech is too technical, not personal enough; Alice angrily ends the chat and turns away, frustrated at how difficult the task of writing has become; but she reworks the speech, and the movie doesn’t feel the need to show her revision process: we get it in the delivery itself, and it’s moving and inviting. If a movie must offer a kind of TED-talk presentation on a degenerative illness, the way Still Alice does so is the most effective, the most poignant method: humanizing, sympathetic, not self-pitying or self-absorbed.)

    I had a hard time convincing anyone to see Still Alice with me. And it’s no wonder. How do you recommend a movie like this—even when it’s so, so good—when you know people are going to be sad watching it? At some level, we go to movies like Still Alice for catharsis. The emotional intensity of the material demands that we confront our own fears. Perhaps the most honest thing Alice says is about the way this disease assaults her very identity, which is so wrapped up in her success as a professional thinker. Still Alice doesn’t try to explain this injustice. It confronts the tragedy—and the beauty—of human existence. And believe it or not, the movie isn’t a total bummer. “How can you call my life tragic?” Alice wonders. “I’ve had a successful career, a happy, stable marriage, three wonderful children” [I’m paraphrasing].”

    So, go see Still Alice, even though you are going to be sad, during and after. But let the intense gratitude of the film wash over you as much as the sorrow. My favorite moment in Still Alice occurs during Alice’s speech at the convention, when she quotes that lovely poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, giving it a new kind of heartbreaking and beautiful meaning. I think I’ll close with it.

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Source: The Complete Poems 1926-1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)

Great Expectations

When Anne Bancroft, as the kooky old spinster Miss Dinsmoor, orders the young Finn (Jeremy James Kissner) to “Dance! Dance! Dance!,” I couldn’t help laughing. It reminded me of an early episode in 30 Rock when Jenna (Jane Krakowski) is at a ball trying to land an Austrian prince (played with so much grotesque brilliance by Paul Reubens), himself a long-suffering victim of the royal family’s generations of in-breeding. (He dies in the scene after drinking champaigne because his body cannot metabolize grapes.) The prince orders Jenna to “Dance!” and then keeps requesting different styles: “Jazz! Tap! Jitterbug! Charleston! Interpretive! Twirl! Do it again! Keep Twirling!”

Alfonso Cuarón’s 1998 adaptation of Great Expectations may be the most beautiful film of the 90s. And it’s no wonder, because the director of photography is Emmanuel Lubezki. (He just won his second Academy Award for his work on Birdman; his first win was for 2013’s Gravity, also directed by Caurón.) The movie is like a dance: every image connects thematically and has a rhythm; the scenes are elegant, beautiful, and complex; they are full of associations of other movies—Sunset Boulevard, A Streetcar Named Desire, maybe even a little of Bertolucci’s The Conformist—and yet they do not feel like rip-offs of other works. They may be camera-work riffs, or maybe they’re just the result of two cinematic show-offs. But who cares? The visual beauty of Great Expectations is so dazzling that it threatens to undermine my own stubborn love of plot.

Cuarón isn’t interested in telling the Dickens story faithfully in terms of plot: he changes many of the names, the setting, and the time period. But thematically, Cuarón beautifully captures the essence of Dickens’s great work and the classism at the heart of Pip’s (or Finn’s) rise from poverty to success and his deep desire to be great, to be a gentleman, to attain a girl (Estella, played as an adult by Gwyneth Paltrow) who is ranks above him. So, while Great Expectations `98 lacks some of the weight of the novel (in the same way that the stunning, naturalistically filmed 2011 Jane Eyre was gorgeous to look at it but strangely less effective than the novel itself or even some of the stagier filmings of the material).

But, while I didn’t feel as much of an emotional wallop in Cuarón’s Great Expectations, I was struck by the way he gets movies and how to turn novels into movies, more than most filmmakers. When we’re watching two masters like Cuarón and Lubezki at work, we see all that is possible in movies that cannot be achieved on a page: the splendiferous greens which permeate every image, finding themselves on clothes, furniture, drapes, and in the lighting itself; the deliciously Gothic Miss Dinsmoor (Miss Havisham in the novel), played like an even older version of Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, with a little Blanche DuBois thrown in for good measure. (The film is set in Florida, on the Gulf.)

Ethan Hawke plays Finn, who grows up with his simple handyman brother-in-law Joe (Chris Cooper) and becomes a sensation in the New York art world thanks to an unknown benefactor. Robert De Niro plays the escaped conflict Finn assists early in the movie. The film is at its most bizarre (and delightful) when dwelling with the eccentric Miss Dinsmoor, who makes him come visit her dilapidated Spanish mansion, which looks like a resort hotel that was abandoned thirty years ago with all the furniture and the glasses still perfectly arranged (though they're now covered with a thick layer of dust). With Hank Azaria, Kim Dickens, and Josh Mostel. Cuarón co-wrote the screenplay with David Mamet and Mitch Glazer.

The Duff

The Duff is a high school comedy which purports to be about the arbitrary nature of labels, but isn’t quite ready to exist without them. It’s also a movie about dating and the social hierarchy and bullying and self-image and the nature of beauty and social media. (Because teen comedies can’t just be about friendship, anymore). The film grasps at so many themes and plot elements that its most charming feature—an unlikely, weird friendship between the protagonist Bianca (who’s basically invisible in her high school) and her nemesis, a “jock” named Wes—flounders, only to be given artificial respiration under the guise of an obvious and clichéd romance.

Wes is played by Robbie Amell, whose eyebrows look like perfectly manicured little boomerangs, framing his forehead in a constant furrow. (He looks like a young Louis Jourdan.) His character is more than a bit confounding, probably because the movie, which claims to be anti-labeling, labels him a “jock” and a “man-whore” from the word go, and then tries to humanize him. (It works because Amell has charm to spare even when he’s being sleazy, and despite a contrived effort to give him home-life problems near the end of the film.)

Bianca seems to dislike Wes, even though they grew up together and he is the only guy who pays any attention to her. (Granted, he’s also kind of a jerk to her, unless they’re alone, which is when he actually acts like a friend.) It is Wes who sets the plot into motion, by telling Bianca that in her friendship with beautiful, popular girls Jessica and Casey, Bianca is the “duff” or the “designated ugly fat friend.” Bianca has no reason to suspect Jessica and Casey of such conspiracy, but she dumps them anyway (in a badly staged scene in the school library).

The Duff has a lot of structural problems, and chief among these is the way it loses track of certain plot elements and characters. After Bianca’s friendship with Jessica and Casey goes on the skids, we barely see them until the end of the movie. A film about teenage girls that fails to explore the dynamics of their friendship feels a bit like a copout. The movie awkwardly transitions into a romantic teen comedy about a girl who’s anti-labels trying to change herself so that she can impress a guy.

This is director Ari Sandel’s first feature (he won an Oscar for his 2005 short film West Bank Story), and he is working with a script by Josh A. Cagan from Kody Keplinger’s novel. Sandel doesn’t yet have the knack of shaping a scene and drawing out the humor organically. There are some laughs, but Sandel relies too heavily obvious jokes and mugging from his performers. And, what’s more, he ties everything together with a clumsy narration from his star, Mae Whitman (whom viewers may remember as the girlfriend of Michael Cera’s character on Arrested Development). Whitman’s character, Bianca, often embarrasses herself for a laugh, and while this kind of self-deprecating humor can be charming, it sometimes feels like an act of desperation on the director’s part, as though he weren’t sure why we should like Bianca in the first place.

There’s a scene where Bianca and Wes go to a mall so that Bianca can revamp her wardrobe. Despite the fact that Wes is Bianca’s nemesis (at this point in the film, anyway), she enlists his help because he’s popular and knows what makes a girl look appealing. At least, that’s what Bianca imagines. But Bianca tries on a series of hideous outfits and the scene turns into a big joke. We’re just never sure who the joke is supposed to be on. Bianca makes out with a mannequin (calling him Toby, after the boy on whom she has a crush), while Wes records the scene with his phone so they can “evaluate” her later. This scene is really just a setup for one of the movie’s major plot points: Bianca’s mugging is also recorded by an underling of the high school queen bee and the video goes viral. Bianca becomes the school pariah, and all because the queen bee (played by Madison Morgan, who’s terrific and possesses not just a flare for being conniving and narcissistic, but also a real comic touch that accentuates her performance).

The Duff is an imperfect comedy, but even still, that moment—when the girl and the guy express their love for each other at the school prom— that we’ve been essentially conditioned to expect in a film like this is somehow just as exciting as if it were new. And, even though the film has problems, I appreciate that it has layers to it, despite the fact that those layers aren’t very seamlessly put together.

With Allison Janney (as Bianca’s mom) and Ken Jeong (as her journalism teacher).