It’s Oscar season, in case you hadn’t noticed. The time when movies — already opened in New York and Los Angeles — are opening closer to home, shored up by the attention the nominations (or even the whiff of a nomination) can stir.
“Still Alice” and “Cake” are two indie dramas that should benefit from this annual rite. Although, owing to deep tissue performances by Oscar front-runner Julianne Moore and Golden Globe nominee and old friend Jennifer Aniston, they deserve our interest regardless of the award-season dance.
“Still Alice” | * * * ½ Stars | Drama | PG-13 | 99 minutes | At the Chez Artiste.
In “Still Alice,” Moore plays Alice Howland, a Columbia University linguistics professor who at 50 is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease.
This is no spoiler. Knowing from the get-go the devastation Alice and her family face adds to the film’s power.
Blips of Alice’s confusion become harbingers of encroaching disaster. The use of tracking shots that follow Alice as she becomes disoriented during a familiar run give the film the subtlest horror-film flavor. As if to ask, rightly, what could be scarier than the aggressive erosion of the identity each of us builds with our memories?
“Still Alice” is directed with delicate appreciation for the more quotidian rhythms of life by indie stalwarts Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland.
Moore’s depiction of Alice’s journey is so riveting that it makes it easy to overlook how full of grace the movie-making is or how vitally the supporting cast buttresses the protagonist. Alec Baldwin plays steadfast husband John. Kate Bosworth, Kristen Stewart and Hunter Parrish portray their very different but present children.
In addition to bearing the weight of her diagnosis, Alice learns her rare form of Alzheimer’s is very likely to be passed to her children. So each must decide if they want to know their fate. In a telling twist, it’s the child who doesn’t want to know her genetic status who wants to know the most about how Alice is feeling.
Yes, sorrow-laden and moving, “Still Alice” isn’t gratuitously grim nor is it easily sentimental. There’s humor here — vaguely gallows-like, perhaps but also earned.
Early on, the pragmatic professor leaves herself a video with guidance about what she should do once she’s been robbed of too much cognition. As smart as she has been, Alice cannot anticipate how cruelly clever her enemy will be.
Alice’s neurologist, Dr. Benjamin (Stephen Kunken), is at first only a voice bearing bad, then worse, tidings. We hear his methodical queries but see only Alice’s face during their initial consult. Over time he enters the frame, gently significant but never intruding on film, which is based on a novel by Lisa Genova, a best-selling author and neurologist.
Like Genova, the film’s directors know something about medical foes. At the time the couple undertook the project, Glatzer was diagnosed with ALS. For those who know the pair’s Sundance-winning L.A. story “Quinceañera,” the empathy that infuses “Still Alice” can’t be credited solely to this diagnosis of the terminal neurological disease.
Instead, like Alice’s doc, we do well to admire their utter resourcefulness in the face of unforgiving odds.
Edgy Aniston
“Cake” is a different tale of misery. When we meet Claire, she’s scarred physically and emotionally. She’s eating painkillers and moving as if she’d been run over by a semi. For a parent who’s lost a child, that analogy is likely an understatement.
“Cake” | * * * Stars | Drama | R | 102 minutes.
Jennifer Aniston burrows into Claire’s walking-wounded gait and eclipsed mood. She also makes clear that in the midst of her dulled affect, Claire can wield precision cuts. The easy targets of her ire include Annette (Felicity Huffman), the moderator of a chronic-pain group, and her estranged husband (Chris Messina).
Directed by Daniel Barnz from a screenplay by Patrick Tobin, “Cake” reveals its backstory as gingerly as Claire moves from car to bed to couch to bed. She sees a physical therapist (Mamie Gummer) but doesn’t appear to be taking baby steps, let alone making strides, toward recovery.
Things change — though it’s hard to know if it’s for the better — when Claire becomes obsessed with Nina. Anna Kendrick makes appearances as the biting hallucination of the fellow group member who leapt from a freeway overpass.
It’s a telling death for a film that travels the surface streets and byways of L.A. Claire doesn’t drive and keeps the passenger seat cranked back. So much of what we spy are the tops of palms, glimpses of blue sky.
Claire’s pursuit of the mystery of Nina’s suicide leads her to seek out her husband (Sam Worthington) and pushes the story toward a kind of redemption fable. But Aniston’s grasp of Claire’s shut-down, even destructive, anguish never wavers.
Another fine reason to see “Cake” is for Adriana Barraza’s portrayal of Claire’s concerned housekeeper. Silvana’s vigilant care of her employer might have saddled the movie with a kind of romanticized image of domestic help. Instead Barraza delivers a textured, observant heroine. And the filmmakers make sure we see, however briefly, that she has a life beyond Claire’s care.
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, lkennedy@denverpost.com or
