‘Still Alice’ Review: Dimming the Lights

Julianne Moore has an inner glow that’s entirely her own, so it’s all the more affecting, in “Still Alice,” to see her play a woman whose light is dimmed by the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. At the age of 50, and at the peak of her career as a distinguished professor of linguistics at Columbia University, Alice Howland begins to experience memory glitches. Indeed, she has an alarming one in the course of giving a lecture on memory. This conjunction of circumstances points up the anguish of her affliction, but also the nature of a film that benefits from Ms. Moore’s lovely performance, yet suffers from glib contrivance and predictable writing. (Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland directed from their adaptation of a novel by Lisa Genova.)

In one sense, movies about Alzheimer’s can’t help but be predictable. As soon as we know the subject, a cruel disease with no cure, we’re on the lookout for telltale signs. The potential for surprise lies not in the narrative trajectory, which skews inexorably downward, but in revelations along the way—the sometimes surreal thought processes, for example, of Julie Christie’s character in “Away From Her.” (It’s the sort of quicksilver quality best exemplified by the text of “Wings,” Arthur Kopit’s play about a stroke victim.)

Few surprises mark the course of this film, or the mostly pedestrian dialogue; it’s not a good sign when, as happens often in “Still Alice,” you can anticipate the next sentence of a conversation. Alec Baldwin is particularly burdened by banal writing in the role of Alice’s husband, John. Kristen Stewart is Alice’s younger daughter, Lydia, who wants to be an actress. Since Ms. Stewart gives another of her limited-affect performances, it’s hard to know whether Lydia’s appearance in an off-Broadway production of “Three Sisters” is meant to show that she has made a good career choice or a bad one, though the latter interpretation seems more plausible.

Ms. Moore, for her part, doesn’t need fine writing to create marvelous moments; some of her most powerful scenes are wordless ones in which Alice is looking anxious, confused or utterly haunted. When the script provides exceptional material, however, this extraordinary actress takes it to a memorably high level. Soon after Alice is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she records on her laptop a video message for the person she expects to become. This simple device sets up a later scene with two Alices face to face, one of them vibrantly present and the other still there but flickeringly so. Ms. Moore turns the confrontation into dramatic treasure.

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‘Vanya On 42nd Street’ (1994)

Julianne Moore is Yelena in this mesmerizing film by Louis Malle. (It was his last.) A cast that includes Wallace Shawn rehearses David Mamet’s adaptation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” As the line between drama and reality blurs, the action glides back and forth between the adjacent realities of theater and life. If you want to be literal about it, the process is an actors’ workshop, but literalness can’t describe the hypnotic ease with which the actors assume, then shed, then resume their roles.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com