Still Alice (2014) was picked because, based on the brief plot summary I read, I figured it could speak to the Catholic Church’s pro-life views.  They are rightly tied to the issue of abortion, but they extend to the dignity of all human life.  This includes people with rare diseases who from the perspective of those not going through their struggles, appears to not have the same quality of life as they rest of us.  The Church argues forcefully that even a person whose entire identity is seemingly wiped away, as with somebody diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, that person is Still Alice.  For the most part, I was happy with how the film handled the condition of losing one’s memory save for two moments.  I will discuss one of those in a moment, but since abortion came up, there is one I would mention here.  The main character, Dr. Alice Daly Howland (Julianne Moore) has a rare form of the disease that is genetic, meaning she has a strong likelihood of passing it on to her children.  One of them who exhibits the gene is her oldest daughter, Anna Howland-Jones (Kate Bosworth).  In discussing this development with her mother, Anna remarks that she can test fertilized embryos to see in early stages whether the babies carry the gene.  Please note the purposeful use of the word “babies” for what else is there to call them?  Thankfully, the matter is not explored further, and Anna ends up having a healthy set of twins.  Either way, with or without a future with Alzheimer’s, they would have the same right to life as any one of us.  I strongly feel this is the point of the movie.

What Dr. Howland feels strongly about at the start of Still Alice is keeping her academic career going as a professor of linguistics at Columbia University.  She also has a loving family with her physician husband, John Howland (Alec Baldwin), who is also on the faculty at Columbia.  Along with Anna and John, there is her son Tom Howland (Hunter Parrish), who all gather to celebrate her fiftieth birthday.  After giving a lecture at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), Dr. Howland visits her youngest daughter, Lydia Howland (Kristen Stewart), who is pursuing a career in acting on the West Coast, much to her academically minded mother’s consternation.  By this early stage of the film, we have seen her have a few minor struggles in a way that could happen to any of us.  It is when she is back at Columbia and out for a jog that she has her first episode where she is clearly confused, looking around the campus in a fog of not knowing her surroundings.  This is what prompts a visit to a neurologist, Dr. Benjamin (Stephen Kunken).  Everything comes back normal, including a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test, but there is a continued regression of cognitive abilities.  Dr. Howland voices her concerns to John, who initially dismisses the possibility of Alzheimer’s until he goes with her to see Dr. Benjamin.  Not only does Dr. Benjamin confirm Dr. Howland’s worst fears, but he indicates that her children have a strong likelihood that they will also develop the disease.  Having received the news, Dr. Howland calls together her family to tell them about her condition.  They are shocked that their brilliant mother who takes good care of herself would be in such a state, but then she tells them about its rare hereditary nature.  All she can do is apologize, and my heart went out to her in that moment.  For the time being, she does things to try and slow the disease’s progression, like practicing certain words and reciting the names of her children.  She also does something that goes directly against Catholic teaching: she records for herself suicide instructions for when her memory becomes so bad that she can no longer tell herself the answers to the questions she rehearses on a daily basis.  The next move is stepping away from her faculty position, which is tough because she loves her work.  Once this is done, John and she take some time at a house they own on the beach.  Not only do you begin to see Alzheimer’s take more of a toll on Dr. Howland, but her husband also has trouble dealing with the situation.  She wants him to take a sabbatical to be with her in her declining health, but he remains committed to his work as a coping mechanism.  He even suggests that she leave behind everything that is familiar to her and come with him to Minnesota while he fulfills a year-long position at the Mayo Clinic.  Still, with Dr. Benjamin’s blessing, Dr. Howland is given one last opportunity to give her thoughts on her condition at an Alzheimer’s conference, which she does to broad acclaim.  It is really her last moment of relatively normal function.  Soon, they have a caretaker, Elena (Caridad Montanez), coming to be with her on the days that John cannot be at home.  While on a video call with Lydia before Elena arrives one day, Dr. Howland finds the video message she recorded to remind her where the pills are to take to make her “go to sleep.”  In this case, her disease becomes a blessing because she keeps forgetting the instructions long enough to have Elena enter the house before she can swallow them all.  After this, Lydia comes to stay with her mother, who by this point is forgetting how to speak all together.  It is essentially at this point that the film ends.

The final scene in Still Alice is of Lydia reading to Dr. Howland an excerpt from a play titled Angels in America.  The piece is not what you might hope for if you are a Christian, but that is not the point.  When Lydia finishes the section, she asks her mother what Dr. Howland thinks of the words.  The one word Dr. Howland can manage is “love,” and it is the only one that matters.  Love is why suicide is such a terrible thing because, as tragic as it is in every conceivable way, the person who commits it is denying the love that everyone around her or him has for that person, especially God.  Dr. Howland makes this plan for herself after assessing her disease and visiting a home where they specialize in caring for people with Alzheimer’s.  She sees what lies ahead for her and vows not to put herself or anyone else through what she believes to be only pain and suffering.  What is interesting about that word “suffering” is that while she believes that is what it is all about, she later says that it is actually not that at all but instead “struggling.”  My first reaction to this as a Catholic was to think of Jesus suffering in His Passion, and how we are called to unite our troubles with Him in that awful difficulty.  Doing so helps to ease the burden we feel in whatever ails us because His Passion and death on the Cross was done for us.  At the same time, there is no comparison between what Jesus went through and what we endure, even something so devastating as Alzheimer’s.  Hence, it took some reflection for me to realize the wisdom of preferring the word “struggling.”  It also brings these situations more into the realm of human understanding.  We all have struggles, whether it is cognitive, emotional, physical, or spiritual in nature.  Struggles can be overcome through prayer first and foremost, and with some help from those who love us.  With these outlets, no matter what it is we face, we will always be the same in God’s eyes because he loves us through it all.  That should give us hope in any situation.

Perhaps it was that bit of hope to which Dr. Howland clings that kept me from not crying while watching Still Alice? Given my initial impression, I expected to have the tears flowing.  With or without the waterworks, it is a film I am glad to have seen for what it does and does not show.  It is on Netflix if you care to follow my recommendation.