Linguist No. 4: Alice Howland (played by Julianne Moore), in the film Still Alice (2014, dir. Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland)
The second linguist in this series was a person who lost his primary power – that of speech, of language – as a result of violence. Today’s linguist also loses her power of language, but the culprit is an insidious, degenerative disease.
Alice Howland is a 50-year-old professor of linguistics at Columbia. She is the author of a “seminal textbook” entitled From Neurons to Nouns, described in the film as “one of the cornerstones of linguistics education” in today’s world. Early in the film, we see her as a guest lecturer at UCLA, giving a speech on the subject of child language acquisition. She is talking about how children learn irregular past-tense verb forms when her face freezes and she forgets, just for a moment, what she is supposed to say.
Other episodes of forgetfulness follow in rapid succession. Eventually she sees a neurologist and is diagnosed with early-onset familial Alzheimer’s. This is a double disaster for both her and her family: not only is she stricken with the disease at a much younger age than usual, but her children have a high risk of inheriting it.
After this early scene, linguistics as such plays no part in the overall story. Prof. Howland is portrayed as an eminent specialist in her field; however, the actual subject of her research is only touched on in that lecture at the beginning of the film. There is, in fact, no urgent need for the main character to be a linguist – she could just as well be a lawyer or journalist or schoolteacher, a “word person.”
In any case, it is her verbal facility as a person who specializes in issues relating to language learning, memory and communication that makes her cognitive decline especially poignant. Perhaps we are meant to draw a connection between children’s acquisition of language, mentioned at the beginning of the film, and one adult’s loss of language later on? However it may be, one thing I’m certain of is that Julianne Moore deserved all the awards she got for her performance as a person who loses so much that had defined her, yet remains “still Alice.”