Away from Her draws us close to husband's anguish
Sep. 11, 2006. 01:00 AM
GEOFF PEVERE
MOVIE CRITIC

The winter sun may shine intensely throughout most of Sarah Polley's
Away From Her, but the movie's real subject is darkness closing in.
Based on a typically pungent but unadorned short story by Alice
Munro called The Bear Came Over the Mountain, the actor-filmmaker's
feature film debut is a quietly wrenching account of a marriage bond
slowly being severed by the memory-erasing intrusion of Alzheimer's.
Fiona (Julie Christie) has been married to the retired history
professor Grant (Gordon Pinsent) for nearly 50 years. They have no
children, an idyllic lakeside country home and an easily intimate
way with each other. She teases him about the condition of his
sweater — asked when it was last washed, Grant answers "Just after
the war" — and he strokes her hair and face gently when they snuggle
in bed at night.

At first, Fiona laughs off her lapses of memory — things like
placing the frying pan in the refrigerator — as a sign that "I must
be losing my mind," but no one's laughing as the situation
deteriorates. One day Fiona wanders off across the lake for a ski
and Grant finds her standing alone at night on a bridge. Soon
enough, Fiona announces "We've reached that point." By which she
means it's time to check into a home.

The early passages of Polley's movie — whose narrative fractures
Munro's story to suggest a memory working itself through a train of
thoughts — establish Away From Her's quietly penetrating tone and
permit us to study the remarkable expressiveness of Christie and
Pinsent's faces: this couple talks, but this movie's about what
isn't said. But it's what occurs after Fiona is checked into a
facility called Meadowdale that moves the film to another emotional
level entirely.

After Grant returns to see his wife for the first time after the 30-
day no-visitors orientation period — they've never been apart that
long — Fiona and her attentions have drifted toward another man.
While she sits devotedly at the side of the mute and wheelchair-
bound Aubrey (Michael Murphy), Fiona is watched by Grant from a
distance that only seems to grow every time he sees her. She doesn't
even seem to know him.

There is great potential for torrential sentiment in this material,
but it's to the movie's credit, not to mention that of the
impeccable lead performances and Polley's smartly adapted script,
that it's kept tightly capped. Not that the emotional force isn't
there, it is: in the way Grant looks at Fiona as she drifts away
from him, and it's in every moment that indicates a shared memory
either utterly forgotten or suddenly retrieved. And, as terrific as
Christie's performance is, it's the superb Pinsent who's left to
register most of the internal emotional turbulence as a reserved man
who no longer shares a past with the woman he's spent his life with.
While this movie about sorely tested marital bonds will likely
moisten even the most sand-blasted tear ducts, it's also laced with
instances of dark humour and frank displays of human weakness.
Much to his evident discomfort, Fiona lets Grant know she hasn't
forgotten everything. The student he once had an affair with, for
instance, and the choice he made to stick things out even though the
temptation to do otherwise must have been strong.

He even wonders if he isn't being "punished" by Fiona for past
indiscretions. And when Grant goes to visit Aubrey's wife (Olumpia
Dukakis) to persuade her to let him take her husband back to
Meadowvale to visit the stricken Fiona, the bond established between
the two lonely spouses manages to be at once touching, understated
and utterly frank.

Polley's movie also has a keen ear and eyes for the little
humiliations of institutional living, such as the blandly curt
efficiency of the home's administrator (Wendy Crewson), the beige
decor of everything and the glum ritual of awkward family visits.
But these are the things that only makes the distance growing
between Grant and Fiona seem that much more vast: even though he's
just sitting across a big-windowed dining room from the woman who
once showed him "the spark of life," he might as well be looking on
from the perspective of another lifetime.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?
pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Arti
cle&cid=1157925009585