Julianne Moore is a great actress, there is no doubt about that, and this film provides her with another great role, but Witherspoon and Jones were just as good.
Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a celebrated linguistic, happily married with three now adult children, but she notices little things that are changing. At one of her lectures, she loses her train of thought but what concerns her more is that she runs on campus and gets lost. So she goes to see a neurologist, Dr. Benjamin (Stephen Kunken). He gives her a name and address to remember but she can't. Tests determine that she probably has early-onset Alzheimer's disease, which forces her to finally confess to her family that something is wrong. Her husband, John (Alec Baldwin) and children are shocked, but what is more devastating is that this specific Alzheimer's is that she inherited it from her father which means that she passed it on to her children and that devastates her. Her eldest daughter, lawyer Anna (Kate Bosworth) tests positive (it's not a pregnancy test this time), and her son, medical student Tom (Hunter Parrish) tests negative while youngest daughter, struggling actress Lydia (Kristen Stewart) opts not to find out.
Alice is also equally as devastated at what the disease does to her. She knows that she is slipping away and there is nothing she can do about it. She creates a way out, giving herself questions to answer daily, simple stuff, like her eldest daughter's name and what month she was born in and when she can't answer them, she has an end game where she will commit suicide by swallowing a huge amount of sleeping pills, never letting her family know what she actually did. Much later, she tries to do that, but her caregiver comes in, forcing her to leave the dropped pills on the bathroom floor.
There is also the problem of who will take care of Alice. John gets a brilliant opportunity to work at the Mayo Clinic and wants to go, but Alice can't come with him because that is a new place and she can't handle a new city. Lydia has to give up her budding acting career to return to New York to care for her mother. John feels guilty about this, though Lydia knows that this is where she needs to be.
As for the mother-daughter relationship between Alice and Lydia, it gets better in throughout the film. Alice doesn't approve of what Lydia is trying to do and even after her diagnosis, still tries to get her to go to college so she can get a degree in drama so if acting doesn't work out, she can't at least teach. But, they finally start to understand and respect each other. Plus, at least its New York, Lydia knows that there will be opportunities for her there.
Then there are the other children. Anna is cold to her mother's needs, though, despite knowing that she will inevitably get the same debilitating disease, still opts to go through with fertility treatments and eventually has twins, a boy and a girl. They, her husband, Charlie (Shane McRae), certainly got there money's worth. I consider that brave, though she wasn't the nicest person. Tom was supportive of his mother's needs but only Lydia bothered to ask how her mother felt with everything that was happening to her.
I really wish the film would have ended on a slightly optimist note, when Alice delivers a speech to the Alzheimer's Association, when she is determined to live in the moment and make every moment count. But instead, she gets worse, unable to left alone for any period of time, barely able to utter any words, though she knows what she wants to say.
Moore is great, don't get me wrong, but I have seen another recent good film that dealt with the same subject, 2007's Away from Her, starring Julie Christie. Some things that happen in both films are similar, Alice finds a bottle of shampoo in the fridge while Christie puts a pan in hers. Moore might be better, probably because she is in almost every scene and she delivers another amazing performance. Too bad the actors around her can't deliver and rise above the material, though Stewart wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting, though this film won't do much for her career. Unfortunately, they don't have much to do, but they are realistic, overachievers, but realistic enough.
The set is good and the camera work is great, often showing Alice in focus while the world around her is fuzzy, just as Alice herself is about everything else. But I'm not fuzzy about her performance, Moore shines. Grade: B+
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