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| For all its strengths, Still Alice belittles the real-life tragedy of Alzheimer’s | For all its strengths, Still Alice belittles the real-life tragedy of Alzheimer’s |
| (7 months later) | |
| For Oscar hopefuls, October is the crucial month. Reviews are in on most of the runners and riders; it’s time to cook up promotional campaigns and devise voter-buttering strategies. One contender, though, requires no such hoo-hah. Julianne Moore’s name has already been engraved on every best actress gong going. | |
| As a professor diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in Still Alice, Moore is, predictably, brilliant. Yet the film betrays a nervousness about how much the audience might care about its heroine’s decline. So it lifts the stakes higher and higher; a Jenga tower of stacked tragedies soundtracked by an endless irony klaxon. Alice’s Alzheimer’s isn’t just early onset, it’s a rare genetic type with a 50/50 chance it will be passed to her kids. Her daughter is undergoing fertility treatment, which may enable her to test the embryos in case they’re carriers. Alice – and her husband – are neuroscientists who specialise in memory. So Alice is able to have enough insight into her condition to deliver a paper in it to the Alzheimer’s society. | |
| Yet, in my experience, Alzheimer’s doesn’t really require extra upping of dramatic ante. It’s pretty eventful as it is.The everyday becomes apocalyptic. You’re constantly pitched into fresh traumas, new horrors, occasionally leavened by humour or humanity. Just coping with someone else’s suffering rips you up (my grandmother’s been dead a decade and I still dream of her every week). Going through it must be like getting stuck on the worst ghost train imaginable. | Yet, in my experience, Alzheimer’s doesn’t really require extra upping of dramatic ante. It’s pretty eventful as it is.The everyday becomes apocalyptic. You’re constantly pitched into fresh traumas, new horrors, occasionally leavened by humour or humanity. Just coping with someone else’s suffering rips you up (my grandmother’s been dead a decade and I still dream of her every week). Going through it must be like getting stuck on the worst ghost train imaginable. |
| Not only is added excitement unnecessary, it’s dangerous. Still Alice deals in exceptions: exceptionally young, exceptionally rapid, exceptionally ironic. Even more than biopics of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Thatcher, which flagged the pathos of their subject’s memory loss, it perpetuates the notion that dementia is more tragic when it affects the intellectual. | Not only is added excitement unnecessary, it’s dangerous. Still Alice deals in exceptions: exceptionally young, exceptionally rapid, exceptionally ironic. Even more than biopics of Iris Murdoch and Margaret Thatcher, which flagged the pathos of their subject’s memory loss, it perpetuates the notion that dementia is more tragic when it affects the intellectual. |
| Yet everyone who gets dementia uses their brain. And everyone is, remember, a pretty big number: about a million in the UK at the moment. Ninety per cent of whom have, according to the Care Quality Commission’s report earlier this week, encountered poor care. Alzheimer’s differs from other fatal illnesses in that, in this country at least, its sufferers are largely invisible: shut in places few of us ever enter, unable to speak for themselves. | Yet everyone who gets dementia uses their brain. And everyone is, remember, a pretty big number: about a million in the UK at the moment. Ninety per cent of whom have, according to the Care Quality Commission’s report earlier this week, encountered poor care. Alzheimer’s differs from other fatal illnesses in that, in this country at least, its sufferers are largely invisible: shut in places few of us ever enter, unable to speak for themselves. |
| Cinema’s persistent interest in only unusual, famous or apparently extra sad cases risks further ghettoising the majority of sufferers. It can feel as if society wants any excuse not to face this. People protest that there’s no point going to see a relative incapable of remembering them or responding sensibly (this applies only to the elderly, rather than children with brain injuries, or babies). | Cinema’s persistent interest in only unusual, famous or apparently extra sad cases risks further ghettoising the majority of sufferers. It can feel as if society wants any excuse not to face this. People protest that there’s no point going to see a relative incapable of remembering them or responding sensibly (this applies only to the elderly, rather than children with brain injuries, or babies). |
| And it’s here that Still Alice, for me, comes through. Moore’s character remains herself past the point of personal recall. Alzheimer’s doesn’t kill someone’s personality, nor their capacity to feel emotions as keenly as a non-sufferer. In my granny’s last years, her most vulnerable traits – a fear of abandonment, a worry about the safety of children – were exaggerated, as all our deepest fears tend to bubble up when we are under pressure. But it was still her, a woman worthy of love and respect, who happened to be ill. | And it’s here that Still Alice, for me, comes through. Moore’s character remains herself past the point of personal recall. Alzheimer’s doesn’t kill someone’s personality, nor their capacity to feel emotions as keenly as a non-sufferer. In my granny’s last years, her most vulnerable traits – a fear of abandonment, a worry about the safety of children – were exaggerated, as all our deepest fears tend to bubble up when we are under pressure. But it was still her, a woman worthy of love and respect, who happened to be ill. |
| The rewrite man | The rewrite man |
| I had 10 minutes in a hotel room with Hugh Grant last week, alone save for half a dozen PRs and a camera crew. He was promoting iffy romcom The Rewrite; I was being as creepy and obsequious as the junket situation somehowdemands. I thought he was self-aware and charming, but, judging by the comments below the video interview, Grant is a celebrity who incites immediate hatred. We cut out the part in which he says he’s half-written a novel – news I welcome, as someone who has unhappily skimmed the Booker shortlist. This is a man whose fiction I would be interested to read. Hugh Laurie successfully sold a crime thriller – The Gun Seller – under a pseudonym before eventually publishing it under his own name. Let’s hope Grant goes the whole hog: writes a cracker, publishes it under a falsie, then, at next year’s Booker, hops up on stage to collect it. | I had 10 minutes in a hotel room with Hugh Grant last week, alone save for half a dozen PRs and a camera crew. He was promoting iffy romcom The Rewrite; I was being as creepy and obsequious as the junket situation somehowdemands. I thought he was self-aware and charming, but, judging by the comments below the video interview, Grant is a celebrity who incites immediate hatred. We cut out the part in which he says he’s half-written a novel – news I welcome, as someone who has unhappily skimmed the Booker shortlist. This is a man whose fiction I would be interested to read. Hugh Laurie successfully sold a crime thriller – The Gun Seller – under a pseudonym before eventually publishing it under his own name. Let’s hope Grant goes the whole hog: writes a cracker, publishes it under a falsie, then, at next year’s Booker, hops up on stage to collect it. |
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