Still Alice: Memory and the self-made woman

Review of Still Alice, Directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland

The premise of Still Alice is remarkable simple: a woman gets early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. But it is also remarkably compelling – something like a holiday family movie meets Memento – and the result is both heart-warming and frightening. Memory holds our own subjective, individual world together. It gives us our sense of identity and grounds our relationships. Without it, is there anything of us left?

As the film unfolds, we see how profoundly humbling a disease like Alzheimer’s can be, especially a case of early onset. Alice loses her job and becomes dependent on her family. Soon she becomes so impotent that she can’t find her way to the bathroom – and eventually so incapable that she cannot even take her own life, despite perfectly clear video instructions she recorded for her future self. Here we see the pinnacle of weakness – that someone could be so incapable of functioning that she is unable to prevent her life from continuing, even when she doesn’t even realize she is trying to stop it.

This arc from Alice’s golden years to despair to blissful ignorance is high tragedy: the self-made woman, text-book authoring professor, trophy wife, and all-star mom totters around atop her legacy, unable to remember it. And the tragedy is crowned with the irony that she worked in the field of linguistics, because words are the first thing to go.

The film’s cinematography further pulls us into Alice’s experience, as certain shots leave the foreground, background, and sometimes even the entire screen excessively blurry. It almost makes the viewer nauseous. This is by design, a simple metaphor for the fog of Alice’s mind. Her own description of having Alzheimer’s brings this home. It’s like having the word that you need dangling in the air right in front of you, just out of reach. Or another time: It’s like the floor of your mind drops away, and you find yourself without a foundation, disoriented, confused – like a house suspended in midair, unattached to the neighborhood, sidewalk, and street that give it a sense of meaning and place.

Meaning. This is the rub that Alice must confront. Upon discovery of her disease, she soon concludes that without her memory intact enough to preserve her most basic identity, she and her family will be better off if she kills herself. In the end, however, as more of her old self disappears, Alice begins to experience life moment by moment in blissful ignorance. She may not even be able to remember those most important things – her birthday, the names of her children – but the film ends in the hope that even in the mysterious ravages of a disease like Alzheimer’s, something remains to keep us human. It concludes that the sufferings and pains of life somehow grow us, making us more human even in the face of dehumanizing tragedies.

Equally as significant as Alice’s transformation in the film is how her family responds to the adversity of their mother’s mental deterioration. Alice finds clever ways to cope with Alzheimer’s, but she laid the far more important groundwork of family in the decades leading up to the months we see in the film. It has all the usual small squabbling and disagreements we’d expect to see in an upper-middle class New York family – the chill but faithful father, the daughter who has it all together, the daughter who wants to blaze her own trail, and the son who can’t hold down a girlfriend from one holiday to the next.

Brought together by the crucible of their deteriorating mother, they respond with a touching love toward her that ends up spilling over to each other – temporarily drawing them closer. But they only love as long as enough of Alice is there to appreciate it. Once she really starts to go, they get on with their lives. From the standpoint of a viewer it seems cold that a father would leave his ailing wife for a promising new job in another state, but given that she’ll hardly miss him, you can’t deny the logic of it. Most real-life families in their shoes would probably do the same thing.

In the end, only Alice’s prodigal daughter makes the sacrificial decision, leaving her promising new theater gig to move across the country so that she can take care of her mother. If there is any beauty to be found amidst a disease which seems to be beyond the reach of redemption, it is in this final gesture.