Still Alice (2014)

  This movie was so depressing I had to watch two episodes of Repair Shop followed by two episodes of Blown Away just to feel happy again.  If you don't know, Repair Shop is where highly skilled artisans repair broken heirlooms in the English countryside and it is soothing as fuck.  Blown Away is a competition between professional glassblowers and both shows are pure competency porn.  They are fabulous.  

Anyway, back to the depression.  Alice (Julianne Moore) is a linguistics professor at Columbia University, highly regarded in her field with a loving, if detached, husband (Alec Baldwin), and three grown children.  Just after her 50th birthday, she begins noticing memory lapses, some as simple as forgetting a word and others as concerning as not recognizing the jogging route she's been running for years.  Her neurologist (Stephen Kunken) confirms early-onset familial Alzheimer's disease, an extremely rare variant.  Alice struggles to hold on to what makes her herself as the disease takes more and more of her memories.

Julianne Moore got heaps and heaps of praise for her portrayal here and this is definitely her show.   She is in almost every scene of this movie and it looks to be a massive undertaking to embody the emotional work of that character for that long.  The other two standouts are Kate Bosworth and Kristin Stewart as Alice's two daughters.  Their parts are smaller but still full of resonance.  Baldwin is mostly phoning it in but he's not really required to do much else.  

This is also not a fun watch but nothing about Alzheimer's disease was ever going to be.  It's currently streaming on Tubi if you want something to cry over and give you a reason to call your older relatives.