Welcome back to Movie Recap. Today I'm gonna show you a 2014 independent drama film called,
Still Alice. Spoiler's ahead. Sit back, relax and enjoy the video.
The movie begins with the Howard family in a swanky, upscale Japanese restaurant in New
York City. The mood is celebratory as they celebrate the matriarch.
Its Alice's 50th birthday, and her kids are in town, well, two out of the three
at least. Present with Alice at the table is her physician husband, John, eldest daughter Anna,
and her husband Charlie. Before the family starts with dinner, the middle child arrives, Tom.
Before toasting Alice, Anna makes a snide remark about Tom's serial dating and overall
unreliability. Tom lets Anna's remark pass and proceeds to talk to his father about medicine,
as he is currently attending medical school.
Not one to let anything pass, Anna turns her attention to
their youngest sibling's absence from dinner. Alice informs her eldest that
Lydia is missing dinner tonight because she has an important audition coming up.
Lydia, the youngest of the family, is trying to make it as an actress out in Los Angeles.
Sometime later, Alice is in Los Angeles. She is being introduced as a guest speaker at UCLA's
cognitive science class. It is revealed that Alice is a world renowned Linguistics professor,
holding the title Dr. Alice Howland. She is an accomplished academician and a resident
professor at the prestigious Columbia University in New York.
Alice delivers a compelling guest lecture to the young, impressionable students of UCLA.
She speaks with an even-keeled confidence as if she's delivered the lecture hundreds
of times before. However, she gets rattled when she suddenly loses her
train of thought and forgets what she's saying for a brief moment.
After her lecture, Alice takes time to visit Lydia at her LA apartment. The mother and daughter go
out for lunch to catch up. Over their meal, Lydia excitedly talks to her mom about her blossoming
acting career. But the conversation turns tense when Alice starts to nag her daughter about
pursuing a college education. Lydia defends her life choices and asks her mother to be supportive
of her the same way she was supportive of Anna in law school and Tom in med school.
Alice is initially unrelenting in pressuring Lydia. The younger Howard
stays her ground and tells her mother that she's really happy with what she's doing.
Arriving at an impasse, Alice apologizes and drops the subject altogether.
When Alice arrives back home in New York, she goes for a jog out in the Columbia University grounds.
Just like in her earlier lecture, she is so focused on her running but suddenly stops
and appears to forget where she is. She seems upset and this time,
it takes her longer to compose herself and regain her bearings.
These instances of confusion and forgetfulness continue
to concern Alice so she finally decides to see a doctor about it.
During the doctor's examinations, he makes Alice take a series of memory screening tests.
He doesn't share any of his initial findings to her yet. Instead he orders a few more tests
and reminds Alice to lead a healthy and active lifestyle to maintain her memory.
The doctor also makes sure to ask Alice to bring a family member with her during her next visit.
Back at home, following her unsettling visit with the doctor, Alice prepares a Christmas dinner for
the whole family. Trying still to alleviate her growing anxiety about her failing memory,
Alice tries to play little memory games while cooking. As her dinner guests start
to arrive for dinner, Alice also begins to forget little things in the kitchen.
She shoos people away from the kitchen to conceal her struggles from the family.
On her next doctor's appointment, Alice goes alone.
The doctor reports that her tests results all came back fine. He confirms that Alice has no evidence
of any cerebral hemorrhages or strokes. But he is worried about the results of Alice's memory test.
He orders a PET scan to check for early onset Alzheimer's disease as Alice has
started showing sporadic memory impairments and evidence of decline in mental function.
After the grim doctor's visit, Alice is ever more upset. She begins to lose her composure and
finally breaks her silence about her personal struggle. Unable to fall asleep one night,
she finally decides to tell her husband about her doctor's findings. John, in shock about
receiving devastating news in the middle of the night, is initially in complete denial.
While Alice begins to list down her memory loss and confusion episodes to John,
she is forced to finally recognize her condition.
She breaks down and cries at the thought of losing herself to Alzheimer s.
The next day, the married couple decides to go to Alice's next doctor's appointment together.
The next doctor's visit is tense. Alice's neurologist tries to calmly explain to
the couple that in Alice's case, Alzheimer's disease is practically confirmed. The tension
builds as John attempts to contradict the doctor's findings, but unfortunately the diagnosis stands.
The doctor gives the couple further bad news as he explains that Alice's particular case
might be familial, therefore genetic. In such a case, if Alice's children are tested
and are confirmed to carry the gene, they will have a 100% rate of developing the disease too.
The following week, all the Howard children are back in town to celebrate their parents
anniversary. With all their children gathered together, Alice and John make the difficult
decision to tell their children about Alice's condition. They also ask their children to get
tested to know if they have the gene that can cause them to get sick in the future.
In the following weeks, the Howard children get tested for the Alzheimer's gene.
It is Anna who calls Alice to share the results of their genetic exams.
The eldest Howard daughter is confirmed to have the gene. Tom has thankfully tested negative,
but the youngest Lydia refused to get tested. Alice is empathetic to Anna's
feelings and tries to console her daughter, but Anna puts on a brave front for her mother.
Meanwhile, Alice's job at the university suffers as her mental condition worsens.
She is summoned by her department head to go over Alice's semestral reviews from her students.
After receiving a dismal evaluation, Alice comes clean to her boss about her medical issue. She
reveals she has Alzheimer s, but pleads to stay on the Linguistics faculty for as long as she could.
Recognizing that her condition is progressively getting worse, Alice visits a nursing home for the
elderly with Alzheimer s. She is discouraged by what she envisions would be her future.
Instead, she develops an alternative plan.
Before heading home, Alice picks up a prescription for a number of potent sleeping pills that she
subsequently hides in a specific dresser drawer in her bedroom. She also writes out a number of basic
questions on her phone that she should use to test her memory and cognitive function every morning.
Finally, she records a video of herself on her computer with specific instructions to take all
the sleeping pills at once when she can no longer answer her personal memory questions. It is
revealed that Alice's alternative future plan is for her to kill herself once she feels she is no
longer in the same mental capacity. She codenames her plan Butterfly after her favorite necklace.
The next morning, Alice wakes up with a bracelet that is labeled Memory Impaired . After being let
go from her job at the university, Alice and John take a trip to their family beach house
for a quick vacation. They laugh and reminisce about their lives together.
During their trip, it is apparent that Alice's condition has started to worsen.
Alice is becoming increasingly forgetful. At the beach house,
she asks John the same question over and over, forgetting a conversation they just had.
When they were about to go out for a run, Alice becomes confused in their own home and can't find
the toilet. She ends up wetting her pants, and John finally reckons his wife is getting worse.
In the same trip, Lydia comes up to the beach house to see her parents.
Again, Alice pressures her into going to college. Lydia is incredulous at her mother.
She calls her unfair for using her illness to make her do what she wants her to do with her life.
This further drives a wedge between them.
Back at home, John tries to repair Alice and Lydia's relationship.
He tells Alice to read one of Lydia's plays for them to have something to bond over.
It initially works as the two women finally talk candidly about the play Angels in America. But
when Lydia realizes her mother has read through her journal, she is outraged and storms off.
The next day, the rest of the Howard children arrive at the beach house.
They have all come together to support Lydia on her upcoming play. After a tense confrontation
at the breakfast table between Anna and Lydia, Alice remembers she had a fight with Lydia too.
The mother and daughter finally share a tender moment together when Alice
apologizes to Lydia for upsetting her the day before. Lydia tries to brush
it off saying Alice won't even remember it, but Alice insists that she is truly sorry.
Alice opens up to Lydia about what it feels like to slowly lose her memory.
The family goes to see Lydia perform at the local theater the next night.
Lydia gives a wonderful performance, and her family congratulates her backstage.
The rest of the family discovers the real extent of Alice's condition when
she appears not to recognize Lydia as her daughter after the play.
During the next visit with the doctor, John raises his concern over Alice's rapidly
deteriorating condition. The doctor explains how with Alice's condition,
sometimes those with a higher level of education, things do go faster. The doctor
tries to alleviate John's fears by saying he has seen some patients plateau eventually.
During the next Alzheimer's Association Care Convention, Alice has been appointed to speak.
She prepares her speech by reading it to Lydia over a video call. Alice uses
a highlighter to mark her speech to make sure she doesn't read the same line over and over.
Lydia gives her mother pointers on how to improve her speech, to make it a little more personal.
Alice is agitated and upset about Lydia's critique of her speech, and drops the call on her.
At the conference, Alice's family attends to support her.
She delivers an impeccable and heart-felt speech about living with Alzheimer's,
ultimately taking Lydia's advice to make her speech more personal.
Back at home, Alice continues to deteriorate. One evening,
Alice bolts up from bed and frantically searches all over the house for her phone.
She is intent on finding it to try and answer her personal memory test. She had a meltdown when she
couldn't find her phone. John calms her down, and promises to look for her phone the next morning.
Sometime later, Anna visits her parents. For a moment,
Alice confuses her for her sister who has been dead for a long time.
Subsequently, John finds Alice's missing phone; it has been in the freezer all along. To Alice,
it was only missing for a night, but according to John, it has been gone for a month.
One morning, John takes Alice to see Anna in the hospital. The eldest Howard daughter has given
birth to twins. At the hospital, Alice becomes emotional at the sight of her grandchildren.
She asks to hold the babies, and although the new parents are initially apprehensive,
they ultimately let her hold her grandchild.
Later, Alice now has a carer named Elena that watches her at home.
Now that Alice and Lydia have repaired their strained relationship, they regularly talk
over video calls. After one particular call, Lydia sends Alice a copy of her headshots.
While trying to open the file, Alice accidentally opens her butterfly video.
Alice smiles at her youthful self on the screen. The recorded video gives
Alice concise instructions to find the sleeping pills she hid and to take them
all. It takes Alice multiple viewings of the video before she finally locates her pills.
She is about to take them when she gets distracted by the arrival of her carer.
In that split second, she forgets what she was about to do.
The movie ends with Alice and Lydia, together once again.
Lydia has finally moved back home to New York to look after her ailing mother. The two bond as
Lydia reads Alice a section of Angels in America. After she finishes, she asks her mother what the
film is about, and Alice, now unable to speak well anymore, only manages to mumble the word love .