When successful, button-down investment banker Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) loses his wife, Julia (Heather Lind), in a car accident, he tries to grieve but, inexplicably, he can’t. Even with the passage of time, the shock never seems to set in, leaving family, friends and colleagues somewhat perplexed. Why won’t he let out his feelings?
A week before Kate Mercer (Charlotte Rampling) and her husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay), are about to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary at a grand party in their honor, they receive a letter revealing some upsetting news about one of Geoff’s former loves, a woman he knew before he married Kate. This news truly troubles Geoff, reminding him of a devastating loss from long ago. But the effect of this development is compounded when it becomes apparent just how much this decades-old tragedy has impacted Geoff throughout the years, particularly when it comes to the nature of his relationship with Kate, both now and throughout the course of their marriage.
Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) has led a long and interesting life – a very long and interesting life. Having been born in 1908, the San Francisco native grew up in the Bay Area, eventually marrying Clarence James Prescott, a talented, handsome young architect (Peter J. Gray) and giving birth to a daughter, Flemming. Regrettably, Clarence was killed in an accident during construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, leaving Adaline widowed at a young age. But, being the determined soul that she was, she carried on, raising her daughter as best she could as a single mother. However, nothing could have prepared her for what came next.
Each one of us is a teacher and each one of us is a student, meaning all the things that happen in our life are there as lessons for us to learn from.
Most of us probably go through life expecting it to continue on, almost in perpetuity, without anything ever coming along to disturb that pattern. But the virtual certainty of change generally doesn’t allow this. Sometimes it even violently shakes us out of our sameness and complacency, taking us places we never would have expected and reminding us of what we have – and what we might stand to lose. Those lessons are driven home with stark poignancy in the dramatic new release, “Still Alice.”
In an age when so many aspects of life seem so inherently transient, it’s hard to fathom how some can persist with dogged determination. This can be particularly maddening when it comes to those we’d rather rid ourselves of, yet they’re almost always the ones that endure the longest. When such circumstances arise, there’s usually some kind of life lesson involved, one that we’d be wise to address, a point driven home in a poignant drama from Denmark, “The Hunt” (“Jagten”), now available on DVD and Blu-ray.
There’s this thing we call life that we all go through together. Yet, despite its inherent connectedness, sadly, we often fail to see or appreciate this attribute. We tend to look upon ourselves and everything in our existence as separate components loosely linked by certain limited degrees of commonality. And so, when some kind of manifestation arises made up of elements – people, places, things, etc. – that don’t seem to belong together, we find it even more inscrutable, failing to sense the intrinsic validity or value in it.