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Quiet desperation

An absorbing study of human tragedy
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July 11th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Julie Christie is literally losing her mind in this adaptation of an Alice Munro story.
Away From Her

Directed by Sarah Polley
With Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis, Kristy Thompson, Michael Murphy

By Eric Larson
For the Post

As accursed an illness as Alzheimer’s is, the themes it forces humankind to reckon with — memory, time, presence, absence and mortality — are a storyteller’s treasure. Indeed, the material is almost too rich, and any artist who dares approach it runs the considerable risk of lapsing into the kind of platitudes and sentimentality fit, perhaps, for daytime television but not the big screen.
By and large, then, audiences will find themselves pleased that Alzheimer’s and its requisite themes have been taken up by the likes of  Canadian author Alice Munro in her short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” and now by her fellow countrywoman Sarah Polley in Away From Her. Polley’s full-length screen adaptation of Munro’s story also marks her directorial debut.
Wisely, instead of treating the illness as a subject in and of itself, the film uses it as a catalyst for subdued character studies of Fiona (Julie Christie) and her retired English professor husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent), as they wind their separate ways toward the inevitable and disorienting end of their 44-year relationship.
When Fiona begins to quietly manifest the early signs of Alzheimer’s — placing the frying pan in the freezer, forgetting the word for wine, wandering off a well-worn cross-country ski trail behind their northern Ontario lake home — it is she, not Grant, who insists that the time has come to consider long-term care options. “All we can aspire to,” she tells him, “is a little bit of grace.”
When Grant, trying for all the world to manifest grace but looking more than a little desperate, finally drops her off at Meadowlake, the facility’s director instructs him to leave Fiona for a full month before returning to visit.
When he does, his wife has all but forgotten him.
A nurse (Kirsten Thompson) who becomes something of a sounding board and sage for Grant throughout the rest of the film assures him that this omission from her memory is likely only temporary. Grant is further discouraged by Fiona’s preoccupation with a mute and wheelchair-bound patient, Aubrey (Michael Murphy). “He doesn’t confuse me at all,” she tells Grant.
Grant continues to show up, bringing Fiona books and stories about her past. And Fiona continues to regard him only as a persistent fellow who insists on visiting her every day. When Aubrey’s wife takes Aubrey back home, Fiona’s profound sadness indicates that her relationship with Aubrey was more than the typical patient-to-patient bond.
Throughout the film, bits of dialogue and innuendo reveal that Grant was more than a professor to some of his students, and those indiscretions are what drove the couple into the north woods two decades earlier. Whether the years since have been amicable is never made entirely clear, lending the film a palpable tension throughout.
While the performances are excellent and the story is played out in scenes that appear and disappear from the screen without fanfare, at the perfectly humdrum pace of daily living, the film it is not without its flaws.
Polley’s choice to tell the story slightly out of order and to intercut it with grainy footage of Grant and Fiona’s early days together is understandable, given the illness at its center. But, because the film is told looking over Grant’s shoulder, the technique comes across as slightly affected. The camera, too, while offering long meditative looks at the desolate landscape, sometimes borders on hitting us over the head with the obvious parallel it intends to make with the experience of having Alzheimer’s.
Ultimately, though, the top-tier performances, the delicate dialogue and the spare soundtrack — which allow us to witness this relationship in all its complexity, without encouraging us to take a side — prevent the film from becoming too overwrought.
Eric Larson can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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