Still Alice

Still Alice (2014) is about a linguistics professor diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's at fifty. Alice Howland teaches at Columbia and works on language. She loses a word during a lecture. Then, out running, she realises she is lost in her own neighbourhood. The tests come back: early onset familial Alzheimer's, the kind that can pass to her children. The cruellest idea in it is her profession. A woman whose life is built on words is losing words, and she notices before anyone else. She sets herself a test: five questions on her phone, answered every morning. She leaves a video file for herself to open on the day she cannot answer them. The stages of the illness are given without display: small notes, an alarm on a phone, a bracelet with her name on it. Julianne Moore won best actress. The story behind the film is separate. Richard Glatzer, one of its directors, had been diagnosed with ALS in 2011, and it was made as that disease advanced. Across the twenty three day shoot he communicated with the crew using one finger and a text to speech application on an iPad. By the press tour he could only type with his big toe. Glatzer died in March 2015, months after the film opened. He directed it with his husband Wash Westmoreland and they wrote it together. It is adapted from Lisa Genova's novel. Kristen Stewart and Alec Baldwin are in the cast. It runs 101 minutes. Good for: illness drama, performance, and family stories. Less good for: it is genuinely hard if dementia is in your family, and the film offers no deliverance.