Julianne Moore Plays a Woman Losing Her Words, and Still Alice Earns Its Sadness

Julianne Moore plays a woman losing her words in Still Alice, and she makes the loss feel less abstract than almost any movie ever has. The film is a tragedy built on small, specific details: a forgotten word during a lecture, a route home that suddenly looks strange, a daughter whose face takes too long to place. It’s a movie about forgetting, and it trusts the audience to remember what’s being lost.

Moore plays Dr. Alice Howland, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, on her 50th birthday. She is married to John (Alec Baldwin) and has three grown children: Anna (Kate Bosworth), Tom (Hunter Parrish), and Lydia (Kristen Stewart). The family is happy until Alice starts forgetting words in the middle of her lectures. Her doctor diagnoses her with early onset familial Alzheimer’s disease, a condition that runs in her family.

Trailer, via Sony Pictures Classics.

The Setup

Alice’s diagnosis sends shockwaves through everyone around her. Anna and Tom take a genetic test to see if they will develop the disease; Anna’s result comes back positive, while Tom’s is negative. Lydia, the youngest, declines to be tested. Alice’s memories of her mother and sister, who died in a car crash when Alice was a teenager, surface often as the disease advances.

Alice tries to hold on. She memorizes words, sets personal questions on her phone to answer every morning, and hides sleeping pills in her room. She records a video message instructing her future self to overdose on those pills when she can no longer answer the questions. As her disease advances, she loses her job at Columbia, gets lost in her own home, and fails to recognize Lydia after seeing her perform in a play.

John is offered a job at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Alice asks him to postpone accepting it, but he feels that’s impossible. At her doctor’s suggestion, Alice delivers a speech at an Alzheimer’s conference about her experience with the disease, using a highlighter to remind herself which parts she has already spoken. She receives a standing ovation.

The Performances

Moore’s performance is the engine of Still Alice. She moves through grief, anger, confusion, and acceptance without ever losing control. Her eyes remain sharp even as her mind fails, and the film trusts that contrast to do the emotional work. It’s a career-best performance, and it earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Baldwin plays John with a steady, patient calm that anchors the film. He watches his wife decline without ever becoming a caricature of despair. Bosworth and Parrish handle their smaller roles with grace, and Stewart brings a quiet strength to Lydia, who struggles with her own fear and guilt over not taking the genetic test.

The Structure

The film is structured around Alice’s daily life, and it shows the slow unraveling of a routine that once defined her. Meals, lectures, walks, and conversations all become tests of memory. The phone questions and the sleeping pills are the film’s central stakes, and the script handles both with restraint.

The film doesn’t rush toward tragedy. It lingers on the small humiliations and the quiet losses that pile up. A forgotten name at dinner. A lecture that falls apart mid-sentence. A child who has to explain a simple instruction twice. These moments accumulate, and the film lets them sit without forcing a grand emotional payoff.

The Leak

Still Alice premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2014. It was one of several films stolen in the Sony Pictures hack and leaked online on November 27, 2014. The leak is a footnote to the film’s history, but it’s worth noting because it changed how audiences first saw it.

The film was released theatrically on January 16, 2015. It grossed $43.9 million at the international box office, a modest haul for a film of its scale. Its success came from word of mouth and a reputation built on its festival screenings.

The Director’s Note

The film was written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. Glatzer was diagnosed with ALS in 2011, shortly after he and Westmoreland were approached by Lex Lutzus and James Brown to adapt Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel. Moore was their first choice for Alice, and she researched Alzheimer’s disease for months to prepare.

The film was shot in New York in March 2014 with a budget of $4 million. That modest budget shows in the production values, but it doesn’t hurt the film. The focus stays on Alice and her family, and the settings — a university campus, a family home, a conference hall — are rendered with a clarity that serves the story.

The Ending

The ending of Still Alice is not a happy one, and the film doesn’t pretend otherwise. Alice’s decline continues, and the film doesn’t offer a resolution beyond acceptance. It ends with Alice’s memory failing further, and the question of what happens next hangs over the final frame.

Moore dedicated her Academy Award win to Glatzer, who died from ALS in March 2015. That dedication adds weight to the film’s themes of mortality and the fragility of identity. The film was included among the year’s top ten independent films by the National Board of Review.

The Verdict

Still Alice is a careful, controlled tragedy that earns its sadness through patience. It trusts its audience to feel the loss of a person before the loss of a character. Moore’s performance is the reason the film works, but the writing and direction deserve credit too.

The film isn’t perfect. Some scenes stretch a beat too long, and the middle section slows down before the climax picks up. But the strengths outweigh the weaknesses. It’s a film about memory that remembers to be humane.

Still Alice is a remarkable portrait of a woman losing her mind and her family losing her. It’s a film about the cruelty of a disease that steals words, not just memories, and it handles that cruelty with dignity. Moore’s performance is a career high, and the film deserves its place among the best dramas of its year.

2014 film · Alzheimer's · Julianne Moore · movie review · Still Alice