Stilted Alice

    Directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland
    Written by Richard Glatzer.  Based on the novel by Lisa Genova

     Alice   Julianne Moore
     Lydis   Kristen Stewart
     John     Alec Baldwin
     Anna     Kate Bosworth
     
  Still Alice is one of those films that seems to have good intentions but doesn't execute well enough to be anything more than a hollow film with some really wonderful and heartfelt moments sprinkled in between.  I walked in expecting this film to grate on my last nerve of pure cynicism and I was pleasantly surprised that I never found myself wanting to escape from it.  Instead I kept imagining what this film might have looked like under the watchful eye of a more seasoned director.  Or in this case, directors.  Directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland commit the cardinal sin of film making by manipulating the audience at every point.  There is a moment where Alice (Julianne Moore) goes for a run and struggles to remember where she is.  Cue, the sad tinkling of the piano based score.  Alice gets her Alzheimer's diagnosis..... cue the sad tinkling of a piano based score.  There is a nice moment where Alice, almost a year into her diagnosis, makes a rather compelling speech to the Alzheimers foundation.  So how do directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland handle the big payoff moment with the speech? We get standard shots of weeping audiences members and an un necessary close up of Alice as she drinks in the moment.   Of course, this moment wouldn't be complete without.... wait for it..... the sad tinkling of a piano based score.  As a film goer, I think I have enough of an intellect to know when to be moved by the material of a given film.  And as you can tell, I hate it when a film maker goes to no end to manipulate my emotions.  FYI..... the best directors know when to let their material breathe.
 
  I've taken co directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland to task for their direction but
I also have to take Richard Glatzer's screenplay to task.  There's a certain feeling of derision with Glatzer's screenplay.  It's almost like he doesn't trust the audience enough to fully understand what Alice is going through as her mind begins to betray her.  One wonders if Glatzer's own bout with ALS ended up coloring his final screenplay draft with that sense of derision I spoke of earlier.  To be fair, this isn't the only problem with Glatzer's screenplay.  Valiantly he tries to create the people in Alice's life as a flawed souls who sometimes can't see past their own ego's or possibly, themselves.  This is a neat idea, except for the fact that each of the supporting characters are so thinly drawn that their worst moments don't seem to have a counterbalance in which they can be redeemed in the eyes of the audience.  A prime example of this is John, Alice's husband, who is played by Alec Baldwin.  All we see of a John is a man with blinders on who can't or won't face the gravity of his wife's illness.  When we get that moment when John finally cracks under the strain of Alice's diagnosis, the payoff seems hollow.  Quite simply, you can't feel empathy for a character you don't know.  Or in my case, don't particularly like.  Then there are Alice's daughters, Anna (Kate Bosworth) and Lydia (Kristen Stewart.)  We want to see Lydia as one of the constants in her ailing mother's life and we want to empathize with Lydia during the ending sequence of the film.  Except, Lydia comes and goes and then reappears at the end of the film and the whole sequence feels like Alice has becomes Lydia's cross to bear in a cruel game of emotional hot potato between John and Anna and Lydia.

  Plot:  Alice (Julianne Moore) is a wildly successful linguistics expert at Columbia University.  Alice seems to have it all.  A loving husband, and three wonderful children.  Fast forward a few months.  Alice starts having memory issues and after seeing a neurologist, she is hit with the diagnosis of early stages Alzheimer's disease.  Soon Alice's perfect world begins to show its cracks when she is unable to work and her husband John (Alec Baldwin) is forced to prioritize between his sick wife and HIS ever burgeoning career.  Also affected are Alice's daughters,  Lydia and Anna, who struggle to be there for her mother as they try to navigate the pitfalls of their own lives.  I'll stop there, you can decipher the rest of the plot on your own.
 
  In all honesty, I went to Still Alice to do a little compare and contrast between the performance by Julianne Moore in Alice and Reese Witherspoon in Wild.  Moore is a true professional but I think the academy erred by not giving Witherspoon her second best actor statue.  Moore has some great moments in Alice but I wasn't exactly blown away by either her or the film itself.  Again, I don't think this is an indictment of Moore as it is the film itself.  You want to like Still Alice but it's so poorly executed and so disjointed and so under written that you start to wonder why this film is even necessary.  You've seen one over wrought melodrama, you've seen em all.  Is Still Alice the middling movie of the week clap trap I expected it to be?  No.  Still Alice is an easily forgettable film that can't seem to distinguish itself from every disease of the week film that has come before it.

The Mayoral Crossroads

     So this is where we're at in the great city if Chicago.  We have a run off between an incumbent mayor who interests seems to lie into making the city into a glitzy showplace where developers can prosper and there are skyscrapers and condo's as far as the eye can see.  If you want to see an area that symbolizes the festering disgust for Rahm Emanuel, one need look at a stretch of Diversey avenue from Damen through Milwaukee.  For blocks there is blossoming development anchored by glitzy condo's and high profile anchor tenants.  And then the number 76 comes up Albany and I realize that this area of Logan Square has remained as stagnant as it was when I lived there way back when.  No condos, no anchor tenants, just a hodgepodge of mom and pop business and empty storefronts that serve as a symbol of the divided Chicago that Emmanuel has over seen since he took over as Mayor.  Ah, but here comes Chuy Garcia, Chicago's white knight.  Well, he's a knight that wants to see the castle before he storms it and really doesn't have a plan for getting into said castle.  So this is where we are, mister and misses Chicago.  Emmanuel is a born leader with an actual plan, however vague, to lead in 2015 and beyond.  And then we have Chuy Garcia, who criticizes Emmanuel for run away debt and a doomsday snowball rolling towards us in 2015 known as an under funded City Pension system.  Again, Emmanuel knows that hell is coming and wants to send everyone into the fallout shelter and Garcia, well, he wants to see what kind of shelter we need to build before said snowball turns into us another Detroit.  If there is one thing that makes me hopefully that Garcia can be what he says can be, it's the fact that he has actually acknowledged the fact that our police force is woefully undermanned.  How Garcia plans to pay for extra police manpower while shoring up Chicago's long term financial future is another political maguffin that makes you wish Garcia was more of a detail man.  But if I've learned anything during my 37 years, it's that you can't dismiss a politician for being vague.  If you did,  everyone across the nation would be voting for none of the above.  And so it goes..... I give you my vote Mister Garcia and with that vote, I am reminded of a line from the Dark Knight.  "Everyone deserves to have their faith rewarded."  I hope that you reward MY faith Mister Garcia.  And as for you Mister Emmanuel, I came to the conclusion that a vote for you is a vote for the status quo and the status quo, in my view, has reached its shelf life.  I'm tired of kids being slaughtered in Englewood while the downtown area is polished ad nauseum with corporate tax breaks for developers.  We don't need more skating rink's named in honor of the wife of an incompetent former Mayor.  We don't need more foreign billionaires nibbling in the mayors ear for a land grab for some gaudy building to house fellow millionaires.  We need safer streets and better schools and fiscal sanity.  You are the better leader Mister Emmanuel, no doubt.  But I can't give you four more years.  It's time for change.  You're on Mister Garcia, you're on.