The movie "Still Alice" tells the story of a patient with Alzheimer's disease. The actress Julianne Moore plays a woman who was originally happy but collapsed because of illness. The movie is not blindly negative, but through the love of family and the efforts of the heroine, we can see the bright and warm side of the downward life.
01
The first time I had symptoms was in a speech. I just couldn't remember an originally simple word. The brain was blank for 30 seconds. Alice thought it was the trouble of the glass of champagne at lunch.
The second time I went to the campus for a run, Alice suddenly didn't know where she was, confused and at a loss.
Later, there were more forgetting and mistakes, and Alice was truly frightened.
Early-onset Alzheimer's disease, like a devil, broke into Alice's world and made a mess of her life.
This is the story to be told in the movie "Still Alice".
02
The film is starring Julianne Moore. With "Still Alice", she won the 87th Oscar Award for Best Actress, Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Feature Film, and became the first in film history to win three major European film festivals ( Cannes, Venice, Berlin) and an actress of the Oscars.
Alice in the film is just fifty years old. She has excellent work and is the most popular professor of linguistics at Columbia University. She has a happy marriage and raised three outstanding children with her husband John.
The thing that worries her the most in life is that her little daughter Lydia is obsessed with drama and does not want to go to college.
Everything seemed so happy, but the familial Alzheimer's disease inherited from her father broke out in her.
Alice even wished she had cancer so that she would not be so ashamed.
She still has so many things she wants to do. She wants to see the birth of her eldest daughter Anna's child, her son Tom graduates from college to become a lawyer, and her younger daughter Lydia has a safe life in college.
But illness made her no longer worry about these trivial and warm daily fireworks. What she has to worry about is her forgetting.
03
The symptoms became more and more obvious, and Alice forgot the content of the lecture, the way home, the important appointment, the words just said, and the location of the toilet.
Something completely disappeared from her mind, and all life was leaving her. Alice was like a confused child, she didn't know where she was.
The process of memory fading is slow, true, and cruel, like a ruthless killer, holding a killing tool called an eraser, to erase the memory in the brain bit by bit, erase those basic cognitions, and erase your birth. Being a part of a person, until I lose everything, like a new born ignorant little beast.
Julianne Moore, through her outstanding performance, the flow of the eyebrows, the changes in facial expressions and body language, let us feel the true state of an Alzheimer's patient, the state of pain, confusion, ignorance and helplessness.
04
Losing memory is like a lonely person shouting at the valley, except for the echo, and the noisy illusion caused by the echo, there is only endless emptiness and bone loneliness.
The company and love of her family gave Alice the courage to face every day again.
Lydia asked her mother, what kind of feeling is this?
Alice said, my talent, language and expression make me myself, I am conquered by the charm of communication, but now some language is on my lips, I just can’t speak it, I don’t know who I am anymore, neither do I Know what else I will lose.
Her will is still strong, but her brain is declining. The irony is that the smarter and the higher the education, the faster the disease will deteriorate.
In other words, how beautiful and ambitious she was, how weak and vulnerable she was in the face of this disease.
My memories fade away bit by bit, and life seems to have gone back to the past, returning to my childhood in New Hampshire, playing happily with my parents and sisters on the beach. Continue to go backwards, age is increasing, but the brain power has shrunk into girls, children and small babies.
05
"Still Alice" is not the first film about Alzheimer's disease. In "Notebook of Love", the heroine Allie suffers from the same disease as Alice. Her children have accepted the fact that the mother has forgotten all the facts. Only her husband, Noah, never gave up. He told their stories over and over again, trying to evoke her memories for even a few minutes.
The Japanese writer Yasushi Inoue recorded his mother’s life after suffering from Alzheimer’s in the book "My Mother’s Notes". Through step-by-step observation, recording and companionship, he rediscovered his love for his mother. All beings are suffering from this dimension, and they understand the relationship between aging, memory, death and family affection.
There is a chapter in the book that I am deeply impressed. In early autumn September, a snow scene appeared in my mother's hallucinations. She abandoned everyone in her memory and lived alone in the lonely snow that she imagined.
But there are some moments, who is not living in such loneliness?
06
The poet Elizabeth Bishop said, " The art of losing is not difficult to master. Many things seem to be lost eventually. This loss does not mean disaster. "
Illness makes Alice face loss and learn the art of loss.
She struggled to blend in, struggled to continue, struggled to keep in touch with her past self.
She even hopes that her family will remember her once, ambitious, brilliant, full of vitality, or at least remember her in that speech, rather than her who is now a burden. Becoming a burden to others is a humiliation to Alice.
So the movie ends when Lydia reads aloud passages from the script "Angels in America" to her mother:
The souls who died because of famine, war, and plague are dancing up...These souls hold hands and rest on their feet, forming a web, a great web of souls. The soul is the tri-oxide atom of the ozone layer. They are absorbed and repaired by the ozone layer, and nothing will disappear forever.
Nothing will disappear forever, even if the memory disappears and the love is still there, such an end is another comfort for the audience.
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