Still Alice

Early-onset Alzheimer's is dramatized in "Still Alice," which is based on Lisa Genova's novel and won lead Julianne Moore an Oscar.

Columbia linguistics professor Dr. Alice Howland (Moore) receives her diagnosis at age 50, and is at first most worried about passing on the gene to her adult kids, Tom (Hunter Parrish), Lydia (Kristen Stewart) and Anna, who becomes pregnant during the film (Kate Bosworth).

Alice starts to forget words and names (and has to wear a "memory impaired" medic alert bracelet), and gets lost running on her once-familiar campus. Her neurologist gives her CAT and PET scans, and warns her that "things go faster for those with a high level of education; it delays the diagnosis." She eventually leaves her job, and her husband John (Alec Baldwin) has to assume more caretaking.

She keeps asking and answering questions about her life on her iPhone. She leaves herself a video suicide plan. "I can't find myself," she says. "I was defined by my intellect, my language, my articulation. Now I can see the words hanging in front of me and I can't reach them, and I don't know who I am, and don't know what I'm going to lose next."

Special features include deleted scenes, an interview with the composer Ilan Eshkeri, plus the two featurettes "Directing Alice" and "Finding Alice," which include interviews with adapters/directors Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer, who died on March 10, 2015.

Glatzer had ALS and couldn't speak, so used he his toe to type notes on his iPad, which would then voice them for him. "Making films when you can't speak is interesting," he said. "You choose your words carefully and have to bite your tongue, literally and figuratively."

Moore talks about learning about cognitive decline from real-life, early-onset patient Sandy, who calls the approximately 5-7 year period "a slow goodbye."

Alzheimers is the number six killer in the United States, yet there is no cure. In a speech, Alice asks, "Who can take us seriously when we're so far from what we once were? There are changes in perceptions for others and for ourselves. Yet we are struggling, not suffering, to stay connected. We live in the moment."

She also quotes from Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art": "The art of losing isn't hard to master;/so many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost that their loss is no disaster."

"Still Alice"
Blu-ray
$20.87
http://sonyclassics.com/stillalice/