The Cinema Society’s Screening of Still Alice

“It’s always one day at a time, man,” said Julianne Moore at the Cinema Society’s screening of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s Still Alice at Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema last night. The actress, fresh off her Golden Globe win for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama, on Sunday, was talking about how she handles the highs and lows of (an admittedly quite happening) awards season but she could very well have been discussing the act of playing Alice Howland, the Columbia linguistics professor and early-onset Alzheimer’s patient she inhabits in the picture.

The film, which stars Moore, alongside Alec Baldwin (who plays the husband), Kate Bosworth (Howland’s eldest daughter), and Kristen Stewart (as the younger, more rebellious child), is a quiet, wholly compassionate portrayal of a disease many of us know all too well, told from the point of view of the person experiencing the disease and based on the novel by neuroscientist Lisa Genova. “I read the novel and fell in love with it I have family members who are affected by Alzheimer’s, and I had never read anything as intimate and true,” said Bosworth, dressed in a pale blue Oscar de la Renta, of her interest in the project. “I needed to be a part of it in any way I could.”

This sentiment of close and intimate connection was echoed oft throughout the night, with cast members and guests (Prabal Gurung, Richard Phillips, Lindsay Ellingson, Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Tali Lennox) relating personal experience (and most of the audience in tears by the end). “I think it’s one of the greatest fears that we all have the potential to lose our minds; it isn’t hard to imagine how to connect with these people emotionally,” said actor Stephen Kunken, who plays Alice’s doctor, of the innate rawness of the subject. For Moore, “It was a disease that I had no familiarity with, and I felt a huge responsibility to learn as much as I could about it. I said I didn’t want to depict anything on camera that I hadn’t actually witnessed.”

After the screening (sponsored by Montblanc and Dom Pérignon), the audience touched up mascara and cabbed over to the cavernous White Street restaurant in West SoHo, where champagne flowed and canapés of Neapolitan-style pizza and miniature butternut squash soup were served. “We read the book and found such a strong emotional core to the story,” related codirector Wash Westmoreland as the evening came to a close. And now, the critical response is “completely unbelievable! As a filmmaker, you live in a fantasy world. The reality is so hard. You never know when your next film is coming. There is no security. So you have this fantasy, but in this occasion, the reality actually exceeds the fantasy. It’s actually better than what we were dreaming of.”