The Notebook (2004)

Summer 1940: a young couple meet at a South Carolina carnival and begin an intense relationship. She’s from a wealthy family and her parents don’t want her associating with “trash” in the form of this poor lumberyard worker. 

Present day: an old man reads a romance story to an old woman with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. Inevitably, we soon twig that they are the same couple and that the notebook he reads from is her journal. 

There are quite a few problems with this flashback device:

• despite being asked to accept this contrivance, I never once believed it was the same couple.

• more troublingly, the Alzheimer’s plot simply doesn’t work. It’s never explained how Allie can remember the story Noah is telling her, nor who she thinks he is for the majority of the time (i.e., when she’s forgotten he’s her husband). 

• the “miracle” ending is, frankly, ludicrous. 

The highly watchable scenes with the younger version of the couple seem to have greater emotional intelligence, almost as if two different films have been bolted together. Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams have a degree of chemistry together, and they exchange some good lines about the complexity of relationships that confirm this isn’t merely a dumb script. Plus, Joan Allen and Sam Shepard convince as Allie’s mother and Noah’s father. 

There’s a sweetness to the summer romance and you do find yourself rooting for the young couple. But it could have been a far better film if we’d left them in the past.

A Separation (2011)

Remarkable Iranian drama. 

When a middle-class couple (Leila Hatami and Peyman Moaadi) split up, the daughter stays with her father and grandfather. The latter has Alzheimer's disease, but the carer hired to look after him becomes the centre of a dispute that threatens to shatter multiple lives. 

Masterfully directed by Asghar Farhadi, the story brilliantly leads up to one key event and then examines the fall-out. It richly considers multiple perspectives and takes an impressive non-judgemental view.

The acting is highly convincing and the situation seems all too real.

The Iron Lady (2011)

Not just a biopic of the British Prime Minister. It’s also a portrait of Alzheimer’s and mental decline, a history of late-20th-century Britain and a love story. 

Mark Thatcher comes out of it badly (as he did in real life), but Carol (Olivia Colman) and Dennis (Jim Broadbent) come across very well. Meryl Streep is highly convincing as Margaret Thatcher. It can’t have been an easy role to play. The film focuses on telling her story rather than passing judgement and as such seems very forgiving of her, despite offering plenty of evidence of the terrible damage she did.

Supernova (2020)

Stanley Tucci plays Tusker, a novelist who has early onset Alzheimer’s. Colin Firth plays his lover Sam, a pianist willing to give up everything to care for him. The pair embark on a final road trip in England as they try to come to terms with the enormity of their approaching loss. 

This compelling drama works like a play, mostly based around dialogue rather than action. There’s plenty of warm, subtle humour but it’s also very moving and it looks mortality in the face with an honesty that few films manage. The acting is top-notch, with both leads at their very best. 

The music is perfect, too. I was surprised and pleased to hear Karen Dalton on the soundtrack.

Iris (2001)

A biopic of Iris Murdoch, a love story and a study of the great writer’s decline into Alzheimer’s, this is a gripping and sad drama.

Adapted from John Bayley’s book about his dying wife, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998), it cleverly flits between young Iris (Kate Winslet) and old Iris (Judi Dench) in order to show you the strength of talent and personality being eroded by the disease. The two eras dovetail perfectly, often connected by visual signifiers (such as the couple swimming “then” and “now”) that make them flow together seamlessly.

Jim Broadbent plays Bayley as a bumbling figure who remains deeply in love with the brilliant, unconventional woman he met in Oxford. My only criticism of the film is that this almost comically awkward characterisation gives little sense that he also had a remarkable intellect of his own.

Winslet and Dench are both highly convincing as the celebrated writer – painfully so in the case of the latter. It’s almost unbearable to watch her “sailing into darkness”, as she puts it, as she slowly but steadily forgets everything she ever knew and even who she is.

I also found it deeply uncomfortable to see the appalling mess in the couple’s home. They were truly living in squalor with no outside support.

Penelope Wilton (of Ever Decreasing Circles fame) is excellent as Iris’s friend Janet Stone.

Still Alice (2014)

Moving drama starring Julianne Moore as a brilliant professor of linguistics who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's at the age of 50. 

The film focuses on her struggle with the disease, and also on the relationships with her insensitive, career-focused husband (Alec Baldwin) and three grown-up children. There’s particular emphasis on her daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart), who initially seems the most estranged but who then gives up the most to care for her mother. 

Moore is fantastic, as always. It’s difficult to imagine anyone else playing this role with more empathy. I could believe her totally. Stewart is also nuanced and sensitive, and the scenes with the pair together are by far the most affecting.

If there’s a failing it’s that the family’s life of privilege is never really in question. The crisis of the disease would be an altogether different outcome for someone who wasn’t successful, wealthy or beautiful, but – this being a film – those options are not even considered.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

Surprisingly enjoyable franchise reboot. Scientists test Alzheimer’s treatments on chimps, with miraculous effects on their intelligence. The chimps take matters into their own hands and rebel against their human captors. Meanwhile, the same medical treatment has catastrophic results for the humans who take it.

This is sometimes moving and often horrifying. It’s difficult to watch policemen gunning down animals, even if they are only CGI animals.