•
Rating: When the PC software freezes, to make it work again it is often enough to restart the processor and wait a couple of minutes. The problem is that for us, there's no damn button to press on the back of our neck.
Alice is the kind of person who takes care of her body. You don't see it in the movie, but it's certain that for breakfast she has at least four walnuts, a handful of goji berries, and orange juice. The water she drinks in quantity is, of course, filtered. After work, a nice run of a few miles to keep her buttocks firm, and what a little butt for a fifty-year-old; a bit of crossword puzzles to ensure the mind continues to be elastic, sharp, and agile as it has always been. A hectic but fulfilling working life, full of conferences because in her field, the academic one, she is established, recognized, and esteemed. Her husband, a bit of a genius himself, is still in love, and the three children, with their diverse characters, are overall a source of pride. How boring, you might say! The description of the Mulino Bianco family's life isn't exactly thrilling.
Alice continues to convince herself that that brief moment of failure during the conference, promptly corrected in a matter of seconds, is nothing to worry about. But when she gets lost on the campus as if she'd been catapulted into a city on another continent; well, it is precisely at that moment that her personal ascent of Mount Calvary begins. The days pass and she sees the nails, those long and frightening pieces of iron, on which her life of the past will be nailed to the cross. Now irreparably compromised.
And then the foreboding turns into certainty with the final outcome of the neurological exams. It's a bit like seeing from the outside the image of a car about to crash into a wall, with no way for the driver to avoid the impact. Technically alive, dead in effect, because there is no cure for this disease, and in some ways, it's almost worse than a tumor in its terminal stage. Because it's not the body that goes, but what differentiates us from others and makes us special. Our mind. Being unable to express oneself in the usual way, seeing words but not being able to grasp them and transform them into sound. Receiving information and being unable to retain it as if lacking a filter, the net that for an entire lifetime collected all the information of a life.
Julianne Moore, who will win not only the Oscar but also the award for second and third place, is nothing short of superlative because with her dizzying performance she expresses the conflicting emotions that emerge with the progression of the illness. Anger, despair, tenacity, surrender, love, and fear.
"Still Alice" is a simple and direct film that deals in the only possible way, with rough realism devoid of rhetoric and pietism, with a poignant and delicate theme. A film not for everyone, but one of those that leaves a deep, indelible mark and makes us reflect on the question that sooner or later each of us faces. The meaning of life. Is it really there, or are our existences simply guided by chance?
Loading comments slowly
