Grasping the Moment

This film, “Still Alice,” is no “Amour,” the Austrian Oscar-winning film that looked without blinking at the effects of a debilitating stroke on an elderly, devoted married couple. Instead, directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland tell the story of Alice’s early onset Alzheimer’s disease gently, in alarming but never truly frightening or grim scenes. This Alice goes gentle into that good night of lost memory.

Alice (Julianne Moore) is 50 and a successful, world-recognized expert on linguistics at Columbia University. She is married to John, a research physician, and has three gorgeous adult children. She and John occupy a brownstone on the Upper West Side, surrounded by homey, lived-in furniture and mementos of their marriage. All is comfortable, assured; Christmas dinner is perfect but traditional. The future looks bright.

One day Alice forgets a name. Then she gets lost on her daily run. She visits a neurologist alone, goes for tests, and hears the diagnosis of “familial early-onset” that can “go fast.” She also learns that there is a 50 percent chance her children may have the Alzheimer’s gene. All must be tested if they want to know whether they carry the Alzheimer genetic mutation.

What might have been a heavy existential question for each child and their relationship with Alice slides by with phoned test results, just as every opportunity for real confrontation with the ravages of the disease are glossed over or tiptoed around. Except for a scene in an Alzheimer care facility and another when Alice can’t remember where the bathroom is, Glatzer and Westmoreland remain cautious and avoid too much candor.

Alice’s husband (Alex Baldwin) is loving, but his ability to deal with Alice’s worsening condition has limits: he wants to take a new job at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and move Alice there. His need to get away is palpable. It is younger daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart, in a sweet and surprising performance) who moves back from California to live with Alice and watch over her. She even reads Alice a famous speech from “Angels in America” about souls rising from the earth and patching holes in the ozone layer in a manipulative but affecting scene.

What saves “Alice” from ordinary, uninspired melodrama is the luminous performance of Julianne Moore. Forsaking anger and rage, Moore mixes a radiance and the sweetness that she has always displayed in films with a steely determination to stay in the moment as long as she can, then say goodbye on her own terms. That she is prevented from doing so by a simple accident is perhaps the film’s most dramatic moment. Watching the light and smile slowly leave Alice’s face is the most wrenching. Expect her to win the Best Actress Oscar next Sunday night.

“Still Alice” is playing widely. It is rated PG-13 for mature themes, language, a sexual reference.