Moore’s truly MEMORABLE
Everyone MUST see Oscar-winner Julianne Moore’s brilliant depiction of a woman’s slide into dementia
Still Alice (12A) Verdict: Enthralling tearjerker Chappie (15) Verdict: Derivative sci-fi
Julianne Moore’s performance as a linguistics professor diagnosed with early- onset alzheimer’s disease arrives in our cinemas already festooned with awards — a Bafta, a Golden Globe, an oscar. so you’ll probably go to see still alice expecting something special, which isn’t always a helpful mindset to take past the popcorn and pick ’n’ mix. Don’t worry, though. something special is what we get.
Moore plays Dr alice Howland, an illustrious academic at Columbia university and author of a seminal text, From neurons To nouns, who at the start of the film is celebrating her 50th birthday in the loving bosom of her clever, high-achieving family.
she is a woman who appears to have drawn one of life’s winning lottery tickets, with a husband (alec Baldwin) who adores her, three attractive children, professional acclaim, a substantial income, a handsome Manhattan home.
When she starts forgetting odd words here and there, and then feels disorientated during a run on the usually familiar university campus, she wonders whether she might have a brain tumour.
later, after the devastating diagnosis, she wishes her original hunch had been right. When you have cancer, she muses, people ‘wear pink ribbons for you’. society doesn’t rally round alzheimer’s victims in the same way.
That’s true enough, but there was always a danger with this film that it might trumpet the message too loudly. The writer- directors are Wash Westmoreland, an englishman, and his partner in life as well as art, richard Glatzer.
not long before embarking on this project, which is based on a 2007 novel by neuroscientist lisa Genova, Glatzer learned that he was displaying symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the horrible illness also known as Motor neurone or lou Gehrig’s Disease. Fairly quickly it ravaged his body, robbing him of the ability to speak.
inevitably, his dreadful predicament has influenced still alice. Yet the film never feels like a didactic exercise, the dramatised lecture on the cruelty of alzheimer’s that it could have been, and for that the credit belongs perhaps less to Westmoreland and Glatzer than to Moore.
in the hands of a similarly brilliant but showier actress — the Great streep, dare i say — the role of alice Howland would still have picked up statuettes like a magnet attracts iron filings. But Moore plays the descent into dementia with notable subtlety.
There’s no grandstanding. it’s just a sad, quiet decline, which, while alice still retains most of her fine mind, she is able to describe. ‘i can see the words hanging in front of me and i can’t reach them,’ she laments.
For the most part, the script, and the rest of the cast, match Moore’s understatement. even the piano-and-violins score is restrained, while only once do emotions get the better of Baldwin’s doughty character, John.
and Kristen stewart is very good indeed as the youngest child, lydia,
the nearest the Howlands have to a rebel, with whom Alice routinely clashes until her illness brings them closer together.
There are no false notes, except one, when in the early stages of her illness Alice visits a home for Alzheimer’s sufferers to get a glimpse of her own future. A nurse points out a shuffling patient, william, who ‘was part of the team that sent the first satellite into orbit’, and I winced, slightly. The thumping irony of Alice being an expert in communication yet l osing her communicative faculties should have been enough, without a further reminder that Alzheimer’s butchers even the brightest minds.
Do see this film, though. I can understand why some folk might not want to, even or maybe especially if they know from personal experience what the slide into dementia is like. Certainly, Still Alice is no barrel of fun. But it moved me to the core.
CHAPPIE, by contrast, moved me only in the direction of my watch.
Two hours is a punishingly long time to spend in the company of assorted South African psychopaths and the robotic law enforcer they steal, then train to do their dirty work, even with an unsubtle subtext about how artificial intelligence can teach humanity to human beings. The story unfolds in the near future, in a Johannesburg policed largely by robots. These are made by a firm run by a power-dressing American (Sigourney weaver), in which the lead boffin is a well-meaning Brit, Deon (Dev patel), and the frustrated boffin is a mean Australian, Vincent (Hugh Jackman).
one of the indications that he’s mean is a terrible haircut. There are no fringe benefits to being a villain in but this film; they all look as though they were styled by edward Scissorhands.
But it’s an even older picture than edward Scissorhands that really comes to mind; almost 30 years have passed since robocop, which makes a story about cyborg police units dispiritingly unoriginal.
In mitigation, directors Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell do impressive things with motion- capture technology, but it’s unappealing fare, with strenuous but misplaced stabs at humour, as a ghastly latterday Bonnie and Clyde force Deon to programme his robot, Chappie (Sharlto Copley), to think for itself and help them in a heist.
Jackman, meanwhile, is reduced to spouting crass Australianisms about dunny rats and frogs in socks, matched by patel’s equally laboured British-isms such as ‘Chappie, don’t l et t his barbarian r uin your creativity’. As I listened to all this, and periodically checked how much time was l eft, I couldn’t help reflecting that where I come from, Chappie is a dog’s dinner.