Woman, interrupted

In Still Alice, Julianne Moore looks as though she might be even younger than the character she’s playing, a 50-year-old linguistics professor who learns she’s afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

I don’t mean to quibble about a few years one way or the other, but Moore’s youthful vivaciousness has a lot to do with both the quiet emotional power of the film, on the one hand, and its carefully cushioned drama, on the other.

Written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (and based on a novel by Lisa Genova), the film presents itself as a stoic and compact family drama. Steering mostly clear of maudlin melodrama and tearjerker theatrics, it indulges those temptations (for which there are several opportunities in this story) only in carefully modulated (and almost minimalist) moments.

Alice Howland (Moore) is of course a role that’s almost guaranteed to get Oscar consideration, if not the Oscar itself. Moore does well with the part, of course, but the role is probably what won the statuette in this case. (Still, Moore might be the best of the not-great nominees in the category, although personally I preferred Marion Cotillard in the Franco-Belgian Two Days, One Night. Plus, to my lights the top nominated performances by an actress were over in the supporting actress category—Patricia Arquette and Emma Stone.)

Oscar digressions aside, Still Alice has several high-quality performances in it, and the Glatzer-Westmoreland drama is at its best when it’s addressing the tragic fallout for Alice’s family as well as for Alice herself. Since there’s a genetic element to Alice’s strain of Alzheimer’s, this drama also has its modern-day variation on the family curses that might have figured in the classics of tragic drama. That mostly unspoken “curse” lingers in the vicinity of nearly every scene in the second half of the film.

Alec Baldwin is very good as Alice’s husband, John. That character follows a quiet, intricately charted path from gruff disbelief to clear-eyed recognition and beyond. Baldwin’s natural brusqueness serves as an effective foil for the firm, intense emotional connections that very gradually become evident in John. The couple’s older daughter, Anna, is prosperous, happily married, and approaching motherhood. Kate Bosworth plays her officiousness with an icy simplicity.

But the most impressive scenes in the film are the fraught conversations between Alice and the couple’s somewhat rebellious younger daughter, Lydia (a fully engaged Kristen Stewart). Stewart, who last week won France’s César Award for best supporting actress (for a French-language film called Clouds of Sils Maria), is quietly complex throughout.