The actors put themselves through the ringer with Still Alice and Cake, grueling films about Alzheimer’s and chronic pain, respectively. Everybody hurts, especially in Oscar season.
Julianne Moore in Still Alice
Sony Pictures Classics
Jennifer Aniston in Cake
Cinelou Releasing
Julianne Moore has vaulted to the front of the Academy Awards race and not terribly far behind is Jennifer Aniston, courtesy of a pair of grueling roles about women whose bodies have betrayed them.
Moore's Still Alice and Aniston's Cake are showcases for challenging performances about nice, well-off white ladies whose lives are disrupted by tragedy of a realistic but no less devastating sort — with Still Alice, it's early-onset Alzheimer's, while with Cake, it's chronic pain. The privilege in which they've existed serves as a kind of plush, beige backdrop to better set off the suffering they're experiencing.
And the fact that one is good while the other is kind of awful makes them an intriguing study in contrasts about portraits of loss and the difference between empathy, manipulation, and to what end we relish in pain.
The good is Still Alice, which was written and directed by filmmaking duo (and married couple) Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (Quinceañera) and adapted from the novel by Lisa Genova. It's a portrait of a woman diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's that's essentially a horror movie under a bright, polished exterior. Its heroine, Columbia linguistics professor Alice Howland (Moore), is living a high-flying empty-nester existence alongside her equally esteemed doctor husband John (Alec Baldwin) when the disease emerges, slowly robbing her of memory, eloquence, and, eventually, comprehension.
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