Award-worthy actresses Julianne Moore, Marion Cotillard shine in ‘Still Alice,’ ‘Two Days, One Night’

Last week, we reviewed Jennifer Aniston’s latest film, “Cake,” a movie that just missed out on landing a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

On Friday, two movies open that did earn their leading ladies Academy Award nominations – Julianne Moore in “Still Alice,” and Marion Cotillard in “Two Days, One Night.”

Moore, in fact, is the prohibitive favorite this year and Cotillard, who’s already won an Oscar, is equally deserving.

In “Still Alice,” Julianne Moore plays a linguistics professor who, in the prime of life, finds herself suddenly forgetting things she’s known all her life, getting lost when she goes for a run, and losing her train of thought while teaching. She’s quickly diagnosed with Early-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease and the bulk of the movie consists of, first, her trying to come to grips herself with the disease and then her family (a husband, and three adult children) trying to cope with her gradual decline.
Moore is very good at suggesting the particular terror of Alzheimer’s for someone who is young enough to know what’s in store for her long before it actually happens. This is all the more poignant for Alice since her academic specialty was human communication. She, more than most, knows precisely what she’s losing and how fast she’s losing it.

Moore’s physical transformation is so gradual that one doesn’t notice it much until, late in the film, she watches a video of herself made early on in the film. Only then does one notice how far she’s declined.

As good as Moore is though, I found the movie to be unsurprising and not especially insightful. It’s pretty much just what you would expect – mostly sad, occasionally inspiring – and not much more.

For comparison’s sake, Sarah Polley’s 2006 film about an Alzheimer’s patient, “Away From Her” starring Julie Christie, was equally moving but more emotionally complex and thought-provoking.

As for the other film opening this week that stars a Best Actress Oscar nominee, “Two Days, One Night” may be less emotionally driven than “Still Alice,” but in the end it may be far more telling about the human condition than even a movie about the loss of self due to Alzheimer’s.

Marion Cotillard stars as a working-class woman who has to fight to keep her job at a small solar-panel factory. Her character, Sandra, had been away on medical leave for a couple of months and when she finally returned to work, she was told her job had been eliminated. What actually had happened was her fellow workers were told that they could each earn a 1000-Euro bonus if they voted to get rid of Sandra’s job. Sandra is then given the weekend to try to convince a majority of her 16 colleagues to give up their bonus in order to let her keep her job.

Directed by the legendary Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes, “Two Days, One Night” is an astonishingly insightful but also understated look at the financially difficult lives so many of us live.

Sandra scrambles to visit with each of her co-workers, asking that they allow her to keep her desperately needed job. Each and everyone of them reacts slightly differently to her request, some sympathetic, some begrudging, some embarrassed, some torn, some irritated, some outright angry but all have to take into account the complexities of their own lives before they can seriously consider helping Sandra with hers.

Marion Cotillard, the French actress who won an Oscar in the showy role of Edith Piaf, is devastatingly good as the beleaguered Sandra who undertakes the humiliating task of asking for help from people who often need help themselves.

This movie covers a wide range of human responses to the needy and inevitably forces us to consider how we would respond to such a request, and even more broadly, how we justify our lives in the light of others who may be more in need. “Two Days, One Night” is a modest, subtle and ultimately profound film.