My main reaction to Still Alice was anger. Anger that our government, and the governments of the world, spend trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars on these endless fucking wars – wars we are told are so damn important, but which are really only important to billionaires looking to get even richer – but cannot adequately fund medical research to cure Alzheimer’s (or Cancer, or Ebola, or AIDS, or ALS, or any other horrible, incurable disease that is currently plaguing average people.) Anger that stem cell research was cut down by religious whack-jobs who think unborn fetuses are more important than living people, and who also have total contempt for science and believe that the world sprung into existence a few thousand years ago. Still Alice is a sad, upsetting movie, even more so than I anticipated. You can’t watch this woman’s life fall apart without getting a little mad at the priorities of people in power.

My second reaction was a kind of disgust, because this movie is really just terrorizing people about something they can do nothing about. The film makes no attempt to put forth a social message about Alzheimer’s, even though it would have been so powerful to do so, and so easy – just have the married daughter get involved in political activism against the religious right, or toward greater government funding, and give her a scene where she’s ranting about the “fucked up priorities” of various political factions. It could also have had a written epilogue about the disease, with links to get people involved in activism. The film does not even offer up an effective character study of the family vis-à-vis the hell they are put through. Indeed, they’re simply pawns in a glorified Hallmark movie of the week, uttering banal lines like “are you sick, mom?”, “oh, I’m so, so, sorry”, “her symptoms are getting much worse”, or “Minnesota will be a much better place for her, I think”, and so on and so forth. They have all the emotional expressiveness of snails, retreating into silent numbness; maybe this is somewhat realistic, but dramatically it’s a crashing bore.

And is Julianne Moore’s performance really so great? She has a couple good crying scenes, but mainly she just sits around looking fashionably disheveled (they don’t want her to look too bad, that’s never going to sell tickets,) and mumbling. As for the rest of the cast, Alec Baldwin is okay, I suppose, but Kristen Stewart is a bad actress playing a bad actress, Kate Bosworth has done something really weird to her face, and the three guys – the son, the son-in-law, and the doctor – contribute quite feeble supporting acting.

Still Alice: It gets across how horrible Alzheimer’s is. It’s just that it doesn’t do anything else, and it should have.