The Horror of Losing One's Memory

There's a line in the movie Still Alice that keeps referring to "the Art of Losing." In reality, after seeing the movie, there's nothing artistic or aesthetically pleasing about losing one's memory - there are only horror and extreme vulnerability!

Still Alice is a terrific movie on the trauma of the early onset of Alzheimer's Disease faced by a 50-year-old female linguistic professor Alice Howland (played by the 55-year-old Julianne Moore) and her immediate family members. Unlike other movies, such as Away From Her (back in 2006 starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent), exploring the disease, this is about a much younger victim with an accomplished career and a happy family. So the focus of the film was very much on the 'early onset.'

What I like about the movie is the positive message it sent to the victims and their families. Everybody is in it together and trying to cope with it. There are characters in the film who are more selfish than the others. And the seeming theme of Shakespeare pervades in this drama as well - what you see may not be what you get!

I also particularly like the constant butterfly analogy - there are butterfly motifs everywhere from decorations to Alice's necklace once she's been diagnosed with the condition. Alice herself said something to this effect in the movie, "Butterflies don't live very long; but they are beautiful when they are alive and they've lived a very full and good life."

Apart from Julianne Moore who, by now, will probably be a sure win in the Best Actress category at the Oscars, Kristen Stewart also gave a very strong performance as Alice's youngest daughter Lydia who didn't go to college. I personally think that although Moore was excellent in this film, she should have been nominated for her role in David Cronenberg's Maps To The Stars instead. According to the novel's author Lisa Genova, before Julianne Moore was cast, the part was offered to Michelle Pfeiffer, Julia Roberts, Diane Lane and Nicole Kidman who all turned down the opportunity. So all the more credit goes to Moore for taking on this project and giving her very best to win her the accolades of her lifetime (this is her fifth nomination at the Oscars and she has never won)!

I also understand that co-director Richard Glatzer suffers from ALS and cannot speak. Not only did he co-write the screenplay, but he also directed the film using a text-to-speech app on an iPad.

Still Alice is a touching, realistic movie. It is also very scary because this could happen to any of us boomers and if it happened, we should really take the film's positive ending as an encouragement!