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Alice gets to heart of Alzheimer's

Julianne Moore gives an unforgettable performance of grace and gravitas in an Alzheimer's drama that is affecting mostly for its intense first-person approach to the subject. Almost 350,000 people in Australia live with the degenerative neurological disease.

Still Alice is based on the bestselling 2007 book by neuroscientist Lisa Genova and adapted for the screen by directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, a married team whose motivation for making the film was, in part, due to Glatzer's diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - another wasting disease that destroys the body as opposed to Alzheimer's assault on the mind.

For the ravages of ALS, you can see the currently screening Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything. Like Eddie Redmayne in that film, Moore has been rightly nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of the title character.

Alice Howland is a successful, 50-year-old Columbia University professor with three grown children. She is happily married to a research scientist John (Alec Baldwin) and at the top of her professional game.

But when she loses a word during an otherwise seamlessly delivered lecture, it is the beginning of an unravelling that at first she manages to keep to herself.

As her neurologist later tells her, smart people often manage to hide the problem for a while. The bad news is that at her comparatively young age the descent can be much more rapid. It's also likely genetic and possibly inherited by her three children, played by Kate Bosworth, Kristen Stewart and Hunter Parrish.

Moore's absolute command of the material keeps attention tightly focused on her character. Indeed, it's all about Alice, which proves a double-edged sword for the film. On the plus side, Moore is never less than captivating; she charts Alice's descent into the abyss of Alzheimer's with heartbreaking precision.

It also makes it is easier to overlook narrative weaknesses that might otherwise have grated - like the too-obvious irony that Alice happens to be a professor of linguistics, that her relationships with her husband and children are underdeveloped, that such a smart woman puts in place such a flimsy, ill-thought-out strategy to eventually euthanase herself.

There is a much tougher film crying out to be made about the latter, a fraught issue that filmmakers seem reluctant to address. Even within the reasonably sheltered confines of Alice's life - she's well off and looked after by a supportive family - there is no real exploration of the knock-on effects of her predicament, which might have made it richer and possibly also less tidy.

But to its credit, the film throws itself head-on into Alice's first-hand experience. With its camera honed in on Moore, the background often out of focus, it shines a light on the experience of the disease.

It also takes all the moments of wry levity it can muster. There is one particularly amusing marital scene in which Alice has forgotten a dinner date. "I'm sorry," she responds to her annoyed husband with a what-can-you-do shrug. "I have Alzheimer's."

Moore nails both the humour and the heartbreak, disintegrating before our very eyes. She is the pounding heart of a compassionate film that taps into the base fears of anyone old enough to start contemplating their own decrepitude.