Persistence of memory Still Alice Early-onset Alzheimer’s disease steals the mind of a very smart woman in Still Alice, a movie that is sure to garner Julianne Moore her first Academy Award. She plays Alice, a professor at Columbia University who leads a very organized and regimented life of lectures, dinner parties and runs in the park. Alice starts forgetting words here and there, and by then proceeds to lose her place in lectures. Bob Grimm When she loses her way during a routine jog and can’t find her way home, she begins to bgrimm@ newsreview.c om realize that these aren’t normal memory loss problems for a 50-year-old woman. At first, Alice thinks she has a brain tumor. But some memory tests suggest to her neurologist (Stephen Kunken) that something else could be causing her difficulties. After a series of brain scans, the conclusion is made: Alice has Alzheimer’s.
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"What's that word for when you can't remember a word?"
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Alice, her husband, John (Alec Baldwin), and her children are horrified to discover their matriarch, a brilliant woman, will rapidly lose her memory, her sense of self, and her ability to recognize her own children. She actually has a rare strain of Alzheimer’s that’s familial, meaning that there’s a good chance she has passed the possibility of the disease onto her three children, Anna (Kate Bosworth), Tom (Hunter Parrish) and Lydia (Kristen Stewart). As you have perhaps guessed, this is not a fun movie to watch, but it is a remarkable one in that Moore and the entire cast take this one way above the level of your average disease-of-the-week movie. Moore is one of the world’s very best actresses, and she makes Alice a palpable representation of this horrible disease.
Very Good
5 excellent
22 | RN&R |
FEBRUARY 12, 2015
The script, based on a novel by Lisa Genova and written by co-directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, avoids most of the melodrama that tends to mar films about illnesses. They present a very real family going through total devastation, but handling the process with dignity, class and love for Alice. It’s all very moving. The much maligned and highly underrated Kristen Stewart is perhaps the supporting cast standout as the young daughter trying to make it as an actress. Alice beckons her to attend college, but Lydia steadfastly refuses, an argument that becomes very awkward when Alice becomes ill. Stewart is spot-on in her portrayal of a young woman determined to follow her dreams, but also driven by the need to help her mother. Baldwin takes a very quiet approach to the husband, a subtle performance that reminds us that he’s a great dramatic actor. John still feels the need to protect and provide for his family, even if that takes him away from Alice for a new opportunity. It creates one of the film’s central conflicts, and John’s decisions will be a subject for debate for those who see the movie. Moore and Baldwin have great scenes together, especially when Alice reveals her illness to her children. Baldwin’s reactions to his wife’s progressive memory loss, a mixture of sadness and shock, are painful to watch. Moore and Baldwin make the image of two people in love sitting in a yogurt shop totally devastating. Moore gives us a deep, fully realized, multi-dimensional performance that never overdoes the sentiment or feels trite. Alice is a woman who prides herself on her encyclopedic knowledge for teaching, and exhibits nothing but grace as that knowledge is rapidly stripped away. Credit Moore for making every step of Alice’s tribulations seem honest and credible. So, yes, Moore will get her first Oscar with her fifth nomination, and she very much deserves it. There were some great nominated performances this year—especially Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl and Reese Witherspoon for Wild—but Moore outshines the class. It’s Golden Boy time for Moore. Ω
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American Sniper
While Clint Eastwood’s film has plenty of problems, Bradley Cooper rises above the patchy melodrama and overly slick segments with his portrayal of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. Kyle holds the American sniper record of 160 confirmed kills, and was killed by a veteran he was trying to mentor on a shooting range. The film works best when depicting Kyle at work in Iraq, constructing some very tense battle scenes and sequences as seen through Kyle’s riflescope. There’s a subplot involving an enemy sniper named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik) that feels like an entirely different movie. For some reason, Eastwood employs a showier style in the scenes involving Mustafa, which feel a bit false and artificial alongside the movie’s grittier moments. Saddled with the film’s worst dialogue, Sienna Miller battles hard in trying to make Kyle’s wife, Taya, an intriguing movie character. Cooper, who physically transformed himself for the role, does an excellent job of conveying the difficulties and stress that Kyle’s job entailed. He’s an actor forever taking risks and challenging himself, and he’s a big reason to see this movie.
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A Most Violent Year
While the cast and crew do admirable work, the script and pacing render this movie a near miss rather than the solid outing it could’ve been. Considering the talent on hand, that’s a bit of a shame. The film is a shining example of art direction, and one that boasts a firecracker cast with the likes of Oscar Isaac, Albert Brooks and Jessica Chastain. Set in New York in 1981, it certainly has the look of early ‘80s Manhattan—I lived half an hour outside of Manhattan at the time, so I know—it’s just not a crack example of storytelling. Writer-director J.C. Chandor (All is Lost) takes a slow-burn look at the life of Abel Morales (Isaac), a fuel company owner trying to grow bigger in the face of lawsuits and constant criminal attacks on his truck drivers. The film opens with one driver (Elyes Gabel) getting hijacked outside an NYC tollbooth, and he suffers through a vicious beating. His story becomes one of the threads that run throughout the movie. I’ve watched the film twice, and it simply doesn’t stand up well on a second viewing. Despite how real it looks, and some credible moments and performances, the film ultimately comes up a little dull and implausible.
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Black or White
Kevin Costner plays a widower fighting for the custody of his black granddaughter (Jillian Estell) in this dopey, misguided and frequently offensive movie. Costner gets to be drunk for most of the movie, and it’s unintentionally funny. He and the rest of the cast are forced to play stereotypes in what adds up to a big pile of embarrassing nothing. It sometimes flirts with meaningfulness, but it degenerates into your typical courtroom drama where a bunch of jerks fight for the right to raise a precocious child. The whole thing feels dishonest, even straining for laughter in extremely inappropriate ways. Costner stumbles around, Octavia Spencer shakes her head a lot, and we face palm ourselves for over two hours. By the time the Costner character’s dead wife’s ghost goes for a late night swim, the film has become a complete disaster. It’s surprising to me that anything like this makes it past direct-to-video and actually hits movie screens. The film is as simple-minded as its title.
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Foxcatcher
Steve Carell disappears into the role of John du Pont, the crazy rich guy who took it upon himself to shoot and kill one of the wrestlers on a team he created. Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo are heartbreakingly good as Mark and David Schultz, two Olympic gold medal-winning siblings who, unfortunately, worked for du Pont when he had his breakdown. Down on his luck and living on ramen noodles, Mark gets a call from du Pont inviting him out to his Foxcatcher farm. Mark finds a sense of purpose working with du Pont, and eventually summons his brother and his family to Foxcatcher. What follows is a descent into insanity for the attention-starved du Pont, who lives under the chastising eye of his mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and is obsessed with controlling others. The madness eventually ended with the death of one of the brothers, and du Pont living his final years
in prison. Carell is amazingly good here; one only need watch a few minutes of the real du Pont on YouTube to know that he has nailed the characterization. Tatum and Ruffalo are equally good as the confused brothers. Mark Schultz is currently protesting director Bennett Miller’s portrayal of him in the film, and he might be in the right on a few aspects of that portrayal. Still, it’s a great film that leaves an appropriately sick feeling in the stomach.
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The Imitation Game
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, who helped win the war against the Nazis when he and others invented a machine capable of breaking the Enigma code. Morten Tyldum’s film, while a tad cumbersome at times, does do a good job of illustrating the impossible odds Turing and his team were up against in trying to decipher the code. Keira Knightley (who had a nice 2014 with this and Begin Again), Matthew Goode and Charles Dance contribute to a strong supporting cast. Cumberbatch portrays Turing as a disagreeable, unlikeable social outcast who just happened to play a huge part in saving the free world thanks to his talent for solving puzzles. The film also delves into some of the more controversial times in Turing’s life, and sometimes the order of things gets a little confusing. Cumberbatch keeps the whole thing afloat with a typically strong performance.
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Paddington
This one got pushed out of 2014, which had me worried it was worthy of the junk heap. As things turn out, this mixed animation treatment of the character created by Michael Bond is actually cute. Ben Whishaw voices Paddington, a Peruvian bear who travels to England looking for a home. He winds up in the abode of the Browns, where he quickly takes to causing major damage, creating a little marital strife for Mr. and Mrs. Brown (a delightful Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins). Nicole Kidman has a lot of fun as the film’s villain, determined to trap and stuff Paddington. The movie has plenty of British charm, a couple of really good jokes, and the likes of Kidman, Bonneville and Hawkins in top form. As for Paddington himself, he looks pretty good, a solid animated creation mixed in neatly with real actors and actresses.
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Selma
David Oyelowo portrays Martin Luther King Jr. in director Ava DuVernay’s stunning depiction of the civil rights march on Selma, Alabama, in 1965. It’s one of 2014’s most accomplished directorial efforts. In an attempt to gain equal voting rights, Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the march despite violent opposition from citizens and law enforcement officers. The film covers everything from MLK’s dealings with President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to the bewildering, despicable actions of then Alabama Governor George Wallace (an evil Tim Roth). Oyelowo delivers a star-making performance as King, while Carmen Ejogo excels in the role of Coretta Scott King for a second time. (She played the role in a 2001 TV movie, Boycott.) The very British Wilkinson and Roth do well with their accents and create memorable characterizations. This is one of those films everybody should see.
3
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
Things go bad for the sea creatures of Bikini Bottom when the hallowed secret formula for the Krabby Patty goes missing. The undersea home falls into a deep apocalypse with everybody wearing leather, and it’s up to SpongeBob and some of his cohorts to go above water and get the recipe back. The film is typical zany SpongeBob when it’s underwater, rendered in traditional animation (albeit 3-D). When they go above water, it’s a different story. Live action and CGI mix in a way that’s visually fun, but a little spastic at times. Still, there’s a spirit to the movie that’s always alive, and some great random humor (Bubbles the Future Dolphin is definitely a highlight). Antonio Banderas has some fun as a goofy pirate looking to start his own food truck using his pirate ship. SpongeBob fans won’t be disappointed, although they will probably enjoy the underwater scenes more than the flashier live action sequences.
