Leaving Alice's Loss Scene Analysis

In this scene, the audience can see how John (Alec Baldwin) and Alice (Julianne Moore) begin their demise as a couple, as the progression of Alice’s Alzheimer’s Disease becomes more pronounced than it has earlier in the film. Alone in a beach house together, Alice forgets on numerous occasions the date of John’s conference, and the day Lydia will be arriving to visit them. Beyond that, she gets lost in the memories of her past and even loses herself in her house, when attempting to find a restroom. John offers suitable reminders to her, but she is alone when she ends up peeing on herself, and John is unable to soothe her after that. This is the scene which is foreboding of John leaving her for a job in another state by the end of the film.
When John finds that she has peed on her sweatpants, he looks embarrassed at what his wife has done. It is also significant that he does not go to check up on her when she is failing, to begin with. We see Alice in a state of total distress, and John is nowhere to be found. This shot is foreboding of John leaving Alice by the end of the film, not because he does not love her, but because he cannot take care of her from the beginning to the end and does not feel he should have to. He mutters that the incident was O.K., in an attempt to soothe her, but he notably was not there as it was happening. This shot stresses that John is always too little too
Not only because of what she has done, or because of her confusion, but because she thinks she has let John down in some way. John does not help to the situation because while he can sympathize, he does not empathize with what she is going through in this scene. He cannot put himself in her shoes because he always has something else on his mind, from the beginning to the end of the movie. It is worse that he is a doctor himself because he presumably can find himself caring about patients’ illnesses, but when it comes to his personal life, he did not want to get too involved in the suffering. He does not hug her or rub her back, and he nests his hands on her as if helping an elderly lady walk across the street. Which is fine, but there are better things for a doctor to do than to treat his wife like a patient, he is not emotionally present anymore. He is suffering but is not joined with Alice’s suffering. He worries about what concerns him when he has to live through