I wanted to like this movie, and I don't want to be too harsh, but I really failed to emotionally connect with it. The portrayal of losing yourself to Alzheimer's is pretty much accurate, as told by a friend who had experience being the caretaker of a family member who suffered from it. Yet there's something about the writing of the characters that didn't land well for me, in a way that the whole movie could've offered a lot more emotional depth. At first, I thought the off-beat pacing was supposed to draw some kind of parallelism to the progression of the disease and how it consumes Alice, yet with how linear her family behaved throughout, it just didn't kick for me.
Alice's character was also introduced in a way where you'd expect her to do as much as she can to preserve the "best version" of herself that she's built throughout the years, and that she'd do more being an expert in linguistics and communication. Yet in the entirety of the film, there's barely a sign of that in her life or in the dynamics of her family. All the scenes where they're talking felt incredibly surface-level and lackluster, almost to the point that it feels like they're avoiding proper communication altogether. There were some good parts of the script that could tug at your heart, and I think the speech scene was incredible. It could've been great material to echo the soul of what an Alzheimer's patient feels like when losing their cognitive abilities in real time, but none of that carried over into the succeeding events that involved Alice's complete succumbing to the disease and how her family decided to cope with it.
Overall, I felt like the movie took Alzheimer's as its subject matter, ran with it as literally as it could, and missed focusing on the most obvious part of being human: having the complex ability to hold and communicate both memories and emotions, and what you'll do to your utmost ability to keep that despite the impossible.
I wanted to like this movie, and I don't want to be too harsh, but I really failed to emotionally connect with it. The portrayal of losing yourself to Alzheimer's is pretty much accurate, as told by a friend who had experience being the caretaker of a family member who suffered from it. Yet there's something about the writing of the characters that didn't land well for me, in a way that the whole movie could've offered a lot more emotional depth. At first, I thought the off-beat pacing was supposed to draw some kind of parallelism to the progression of the disease and how it consumes Alice, yet with how linear her family behaved throughout, it just didn't kick for me.
Alice's character was also introduced in a way where you'd expect her to do as much as she can to preserve the "best version" of herself that she's built throughout the years, and that she'd do more being an expert in linguistics and communication. Yet in the entirety of the film, there's barely a sign of that in her life or in the dynamics of her family. All the scenes where they're talking felt incredibly surface-level and lackluster, almost to the point that it feels like they're avoiding proper communication altogether. There were some good parts of the script that could tug at your heart, and I think the speech scene was incredible. It could've been great material to echo the soul of what an Alzheimer's patient feels like when losing their cognitive abilities in real time, but none of that carried over into the succeeding events that involved Alice's complete succumbing to the disease and how her family decided to cope with it.
Overall, I felt like the movie took Alzheimer's as its subject matter, ran with it as literally as it could, and missed focusing on the most obvious part of being human: having the complex ability to hold and communicate both memories and emotions, and what you'll do to your utmost ability to keep that despite the impossible.
