Searing story of a life erased

 Alice Howland, the Columbia University linguistics professor played by Julianne Moore in Still Alice, is on her daily run, jogging the Upper West Side, a familiar route and routine.

In the middle of the campus where she has long been teaching, she stops for a minute, a lost look in her eyes. Suddenly, scarily, nothing seems familiar. Lightheadedness? Stress? The flu coming on?

Or is this a sign of something more serious, devastating?

Unfolding in incremental passages, and shot through with piercing detail, Still Alice is the sad, beautifully realized story of a victim of early-onset Alzheimer's and how the disease that works like an eraser across a vast canvas of memory - progressively wiping it clean - changes a life and the lives of the loved ones and colleagues around her.

Written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, adapted from the 2007 novel by Lisa Genova, Still Alice offers a clear-eyed view of a woman who prides herself on her love of language, her ability to communicate, to embrace big ideas. Alice is married to John (Alec Baldwin), a research physician, busy with his own career, but their relationship is attentive, loving, and their three grown children are a source of pride. Pride, and a bit of worry: Kristen Stewart, who shares the film's closing scene with Moore - a crushingly intimate moment that speaks to the overarching power of love - is Lydia, an aspiring actress who lives in Los Angeles and whose lack of a college degree gives her mother no little concern. Kate Bosworth (her Anna is married, trying to have a baby) and Hunter Parrish are the other siblings.

Still Alice charts its title character's steady decline from the neurologist's chilling diagnosis onward, but the great strength of the film is that it never resorts to cheap sentimentality. The facts themselves are hard enough, crushing enough. And the ways in which Alice strives to hang on - memory exercises, dictating into her smartphone, notes on the wall - bring us into her world. Her desperation is evident, but so is her determination.

Moore is simply extraordinary. The actress knows this woman inside and out, and so when Alice's very identity begins to erode, Moore is right there, equally and deeply adrift (but, of course, in full control). In a movie full of moving, challenging moments, of accumulative emotional blows, one scene stands out: when Alice, well into the wasteland of her disease, speaks before an Alzheimer's support group, reading from a speech she has struggled to write, sharing her experiences, her challenges, with candor and, yes, humor.

There have been other powerful films on the subject - indeed, 2006's Away From Her, about a wife with Alzheimer's in a long, close marriage, brought its star, Julie Christie, an Academy Award nomination. Moore is nominated this year, and whether she wins or not, her performance deserves attention. It is one of this very fine actress' defining roles. And it resonates with humanity and heartbreak.

EndText

215-854-5629 @Steven_Rea

www.philly.com/onmovies