Still Alice.

My blog of the latest screening at the Film Club located at the Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre in Dumfries is based on the film Still Alice (2014), having never read Lisa Genova’s 2007 novel of the same name. It was Anne Barclay, our host for the evening, that informed us that the debut novel was originally self-published but when it started to receive a lot of attention it was acquired by Simon and Schuster who published it in 2009 and has since been translated into 31 languages. Originally adapted for the stage it run in Chicago between April 10^th and May 19^th 2013 before it was adapted for the big screen, directed by Richard Glatzer, who died of complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in March 2015, and his partner Wash Westmoreland.

 

Sharing an intimate moment with her husband.

The film stars Julianne Moore who won an Oscar for her role as Doctor Alice Howland a linguistics professor at Columbia University who is diagnosed with early onset familial Alzheimer’s disease. This term is used to describe cases of Alzheimer’s disease diagnosed before the age of sixty-five of which a person’s child can generically inherit, but otherwise shares the same traits as the late onset form of Alzheimer’s. The story demonstrates how the disease gradually affected Alice Howland along with the effects on the other members of her family, including her husband John (Alec Baldwin), her eldest daughter Anna (Kate Bosworth), her son Tom (Hunter Parrish) a junior doctor and Alice’s youngest daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart) an aspiring actor. The film picks up the story just as Alice is celebrating her fiftieth birthday and we witness her gradually loosing her word power while still carrying out lectures and how she forgets where she is during her daily jogging on the university campus. It’s after a visit to her doctor that the disease is diagnosed. This traumatic news resonates through her family, as her three children could also be carriers as well as the twins that Anna is carrying.

 

Alice's younger daughter played by Kristen Stewart.... 

....and her older daughter Anne (Kate Bosworth)

I can’t help but think how much better this film could be under the auspices of a British director, but don’t get me wrong Julianne Moore deserved her Oscar and the rest of the cast play their roles with conviction. My problem with the movie is that the gloss put on the film by the American directors hides to some extent the seriousness of its disturbing subject matter. A much more down to earth approach would have produced a far better film in my opinion. The subsidiary characters on display where not particular likable, in fact I would describe them as selfish minded - big teeth, big smiles in other words a typical middle class American family. The father refused to take time off work to be with his wife before the dementia finally took its toll, due, he claimed, to financial problems but he owned two houses!  Anna, who was due to give birth to twins, gave not a second thought to having the babies knowing that they could be also effected as she was. What I’m trying to say is that I could not empathies with any of these characters, other than possible Alice. A far better film that dealt with a similar subject was Away from Her made in 2006 by Canadian director Sarah Polly and starred Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie as a couple whose marriage is put to the test when Christie’s character begins to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Another film I would highly recommend on the subject of early onset Alzheimer’s is the South Korean movie Poetry (2010) directed by Lee Chang-dong. Both these films treat their subject matter in a very much more down to earth fashion, as I’ve said, something Still Alice lacks.  

 

Blue Jasmine.

Regular showings of Woody Allen’s ‘next great film’ have been a staple diet of the Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre Film Club since its inception but to date nether You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) or the elaborate fantasy Midnight in Paris (2011) the last two films to be shown, have done nothing to impress me. I was hoping that maybe his latest offering Blue Jasmine (2013) might do the trick?

 

The good old selfish days.

Introduced this week by RBC Film Club’s very own web site guru Rachel Findlay who began the evening by telling us a little of the film’s story which involves the downfall of a rich, elegant New York socialite, the Jasmine of the title, who is married to a wealthy financier, Hal. When he is discovered to be running a fraudulent Ponzi scheme he ends up in prison. Destitute, homeless and poverty stricken Jasmine decamps to San Francisco to stay with her working class sister Ginger and her two children. Who indecently, along with her ex-husband had been one of the victims of Hal’s dodgy schemes and had lost the $200,000 they had won in the lottery. Jasmine not only clashes with Gingers lifestyle but also her boyfriend.

 

Before....

Rachel went on to explained how the films financial conspiracy was based on a real life scam that was known as the Madoff investment scandal. In December 2008 the former Chairman of NASDAQ Bernard Madoff admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation. Operators of Ponzi schemes usually entice new investors by offering higher returns than other investments, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. The perpetuation of the high returns requires an ever-increasing flow of money from new investors to sustain the scheme.[1] I’m sure our host’s explanation gave the packed audience a better understanding of the back ground to the story.

....and after.

Written and directed by Allen this comedy drama has been compared to the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire. (A film of the same name was directed by the legendary Elia Kazan and starred Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh). Blue Jasmine was beautifully filmed on location in New York City and San Francisco by the Spanish Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, who also worked with Allen on what was probable his best film of the last ten years Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008).

 

Jasmine's wonderfully kooky sister Ginger.

As usual an interesting discussion followed the film and I certainly got the impression that most people enjoyed the it, but I think we all agreed that it was the cast that helped raise it well above the standard of some of the directors earlier outings. Led by Cate Blanchett who gave a towering performance as Jasmine, a character that was a little pathetic, pleading that she knew nothing about her husband criminal dealings but whose attempts to reinvent herself after she was brought back down to earth were priceless. The British actress Sally Hawkins played Jasmine’s wee sister, as a cross fertilization between the kooky Poopy Cross in Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky (2008) and the steely Rita O’Grady in Made in Dagenham (2010). It also starred Alec Baldwin as Harold ‘Hal’ Francis and Bobby Cannavale as Chili, Gingers boy friend, an actor you may remember from a very well received film club movie The Station Agent (2003) and 26 episodes of the TV series Boardwalk Empire.   

 

The start of a new life?

Even with the standout cast I can’t help feel that Woody Allen sleepwalks through his directorial duties, working to his familiar formula. For example there is always a character in the film that is ‘Woody Allen’, in Blue Jasmine the character is shared between the actors but you still know it’s an Allen script, you have no problem imagining him speaking some of the dialog. There’s also the Allen soundtrack, which he gets away with because it’s always classy. But the main problem with the mans work is he has no idea how to portray working class people, never getting them quite right, never getting to the basics of ordinary folk, seemingly incapable of showing them in a realistic light. In general his characters come across as dream like and artificial which is probable why I can never totally engage with his work. Never mind, his next ‘great film’ Magic in Moonlight will be along next year.

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[1] U.S Securities and Exchange Commission.