Still Alice Movie Essay

533 Words2 Pages

Alzheimers and Hollywood There are many times that Hollywood comes under fire for the way they take an amazing story and script, and completely ruin it when they bring it to the screen. Hollywood takes scripts describing past historical events, current events, autobiographies, folk tales, and puts them on movie screens to entertain the masses. When they do this, sometimes they have to change the story or point of view of the story to make it entertaining enough to make money. Sometimes, this can include scripts related to mental health. A director takes a very real psychiatric and medical condition, such as Alzheimer’s disease,and displays it on screen to evoke some sort of emotion from the audience. The movie, Still Alice, is one case where …show more content…

The movie shows snippets from Alice’s life. Within these moments, we can clearly see changes in behaviors and mood of the main character Alice. The audience begins to see the beginning of Alice’s psychological deterioration when she is a guest speaker at UCLA and loses her train of thought. The movie continues to move through her future, and we see Alice going for a jog and getting lost, reintroducing herself to guests at her home, and forgetting names of kitchen utensils. Alice goes to the doctor for memory tests, MRIs and a PET scan. At first, she is in complete denial that she could possibly have the disease, but eventually it catches up to her. The audience can only assume that Alice has early onset Alzheimer’s due to genetics on her estranged father’s side of the family. Alice divulges everything to her husband and she has a complete meltdown in a very heart-wrenching moment in the movie. “It feels like my brain is f****** dying, and everything I’ve worked for in my entire life is going, it’s all going” (Still Alice, 2014). Moving forward from this point in the movie, we see Alice wearing a memory impaired bracelet, having incontinence issues because she doesn’t know where she is, not remembering who her kids are, and even a suicide attempt. The movie ends with her being barely able to communicate

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