Still Alice (2014) * * *

Directed by: Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland

Starring: Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish

Still Alice is about a Columbia linguistics professor named Alice Howland (Moore), who is caught in the grips of early onset Alzheimer's Disease.    We think we are in for lots of overwrought melodrama, but Still Alice directors Glatzer and Westmoreland treat their subject and their people with realism and dignity.    Watching the conversations occur about Alice's future, we sense these are the conversations real people would have.    As cold as it may seem, Alice's husband John (Baldwin) must also look at the bigger picture for himself and his family.

Alice has a happy home and career when the movie begins.   At first, she experiences common forgetfulness which can be chalked up to anything.    Then she becomes lost while jogging around the Columbia campus and sees her doctor.    The disease will slowly seize her memory and then her motor skills from her.    It is irreversible.    Alice will be stripped of the things she loves over a gradual process.    Her memory will grow so futile that she will forget instructions she leaves for herself during a critical moment.   

It is impossible not to feel for Alice and her family, which consists of her husband John, a son who is in medical school (Parrish), and two daughters (Bosworth and Stewart), the latter a struggling actress.    They take the news with shock and sadness, but don't know fully how much the disease will steal Alice from them.    They will discover this, in some cases sooner than they realize.  

Julianne Moore recently won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance.    It is a humanizing, intelligent portrait of a wife and mother who tries to outwit a disease that can not be defeated.    She takes medications and plants reminders on her phone and computer to test her memory daily, but soon these will be fruitless also.    Her doctor suggests she may have been experiencing the symptoms for longer than she realizes, but was intelligent enough to outsmart them.     Baldwin also handles his tricky role with compassion and practicality.    Despite John's instincts to abandon everything, including his career, to tend to Alice, he knows that he must soldier on because someone has to pay the bills.  

Still Alice could have stepped wrong in many ways.   It wisely avoids them.   Perhaps the fact that co-director Westmoreland suffers from Lou Gehrig's Disease plays a part in that.    We are a witness to Alice's decline.    The fact that little of the emotion is forced makes it all the more impactful.