Have you seen the film that won Julianne the Oscar for Best Actress? Hurry up because it will soon no longer appear in the Netflix catalog!
No one will dispute that Julianne Moore is one of the greatest actresses of her generation. Throughout her career, she has composed a varied and finely crafted filmography. And if everyone agrees that she is an exceptional actress, we still had to wait until 2015 and the film Still Alice to finally award her the statuette for best actress.
In this film by Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer, she plays Alice Howland, professor of linguistics at Columbia University. She is married to John (Alec Baldwin), a medical researcher, and is the mother of Lydia (Kristen Stewart), Anna (Kate Bosworth) and Tom (Hunter Parrish). Dr. Howland is a woman who prides herself on her mastery of language; his ability to embrace big ideas has earned him great success in the academic world.
She doesn’t expect to find herself faced with something that will destroy her passion and destroy her, little by little. Alice arrives at her fiftieth birthday and we are already beginning to glimpse what she will experience in the very near future.
She forgets her children’s names, no longer knows, at least momentarily, how to spell the simplest and most familiar words, and, in one particularly haunting and revealing scene, she finds herself completely lost while doing a task often repeated and familiar.
Still Alice is not the kind of film that we would – because of its subject – spontaneously want to see, but it is the kind of film that we need to see, precisely for its subject. Alice suffers from a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease, and at an early stage.
Still Alice is not a directorial film. He doesn’t stand out for his style. It marks the viewer for the incredibly accurate interpretation of Julianne Moore. It all comes down to the succession, the accumulation of poignant moments: a run where she is disoriented, a game of Scrabble… so many ordinary moments which illustrate the devastation that Alzheimer’s disease represents.
And there is perhaps no more important scene, or scene more reflective of Julianne Moore’s stunning performance, than the one where Alice discovers a video file on her laptop. This scene, which features a decompensated Alice facing a recently diagnosed Alice, is the high point of a faultless career.
Still Alice leaves the Netflix catalog on October 14.