Yes: it opened in NY in early May:


May 4, 2007
MOVIE REVIEW | 'AWAY FROM HER'
Time's Wounds, and the Heart's
By A. O. SCOTT

In a refreshingly direct, unassuming manner, "Away From Her" considers
two great human mysteries: the persistence of love and the workings of
the brain. It takes the twilight of a long, mostly happy marriage as a
vantage point from which to look back at youth and forward into the
waiting darkness. The first feature written and directed by Sarah
Polley, one of the most interesting actresses to come out of Canada in
the past decade, the film is by turns sharp and somber, alive to the
lacerations of ordinary experience and quietly attentive to grand
absurdities and small instances of grace.

"A little bit of grace" is what Fiona, a slender and elegant woman
with Alzheimer's disease, counsels in response to its ravages. And
grace is what Julie Christie, who plays Fiona, manifests in every
scene, even as Fiona feels the tissue of her self begin to crumble and
fade. When we first encounter Fiona and her husband, Grant (Gordon
Pinsent), they are living in a roomy old house on the shore of a lake
in Ontario. Soft-spoken and gray-haired, they are a picture of marital
ease and contentment: sexually fulfilled, easy in each other's
company, instinctively choosing kindness over recrimination.

When Fiona's lapses of memory, initially comical — she puts a frying
pan in the freezer, and forgets the word "wine" — start to become
worrisome, it is she, partly out of consideration for Grant, who
initiates the series of decisions that take her from the house by the
lake to an assisted-living facility called Meadowlake.

Like "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," the Alice Munro story on which
it is based, "Away From Her" uses fractured chronology to convey the
splintering of experience caused by Fiona's loss of memory. The
progress of Alzheimer's — "progress" is one of the medical euphemisms
that Grant, a retired English professor, takes bitter note of — is
cruelly and mercifully uneven. "I seem to be disappearing bit by bit,"
says Fiona, and as she does, she begins to lose Grant as well.

Or, perhaps, to abandon him. In conversational allusions and
flickering, grainy flashbacks, we discover a long-buried crack in
their seemingly perfect relationship, a period many years before when
Grant, tempted by his female students and the permissive mores of the
time, had been unfaithful. Is Fiona's sudden, strange attachment to a
fellow Meadowlake patient named Aubrey (Michael Murphy) a
manifestation of her disease, or a sly way of punishing Grant for his
lapses 20 years before? When Grant comes bearing flowers, she does not
really seem to know who he is. She recognizes him from one day to the
next but treats him with wary civility, as if he were a dogged,
pathetic suitor — "my, but you're persistent," she remarks — rather
than her husband of more than 40 years.
Four decades ago, Julie Christie was one of the most beautiful women
in movies, poised, a bit melancholy and heart-stoppingly sexy. Not
much has changed. The sketches Aubrey draws of Fiona magically (or
tactfully) erase the features of age — they could have been drawn at
the time of John Schlesinger's "Darling" (1965) — but those features
are superficial in any case.

Mr. Pinsent, a marvelously subtle actor with a rich voice and a shaggy
charisma, looks at her with the eyes of a man who can't believe his
good fortune, even as his luck takes a bad turn. And Grant, like many
of the men in Ms. Munro's fiction, is a compound of attractive and
appalling traits. He was clearly appealing enough for Fiona to fall in
love with and decent enough not to leave her. But you can't help
seeing the justice of an assessment made by Aubrey's wife, Marian
(Olympia Dukakis), with whom Grant strikes up a mutually convenient
friendship. "What a jerk," she says, closing the door after their
first meeting.

But nobody's perfect, and Ms. Polley's triumph is to have preserved,
and enriched, the individuality that Ms. Munro breathes into her
characters. The economy of the original story is both an advantage and
a challenge. Everything a filmmaker needs is right there on the page,
but Ms. Munro's prose sets such a high standard of clarity and nuance
that a filmmaker might be wiser to leave it alone. There are a few
false notes in "Away From Her," scenes in which the dialogue has a
tinny, theme-declaring sound, a moment of facile political
point-making. But over all, it is very fine, accurate in its insight
and generous in its judgments.

There is, in Ms. Munro's mature work, a flinty wisdom about
heterosexual love, a skepticism about romantic ideals that does not
altogether deny their power or necessity. Ms. Polley, rather
remarkably for someone still in her 20s, shows an intuitive grasp of
this wisdom and a welcome, unsentimental interest in the puzzles and
pleasures of a long, imperfect marriage.

Grant, at one point, muses that the passions of youth seem
"superficial" when compared with the deeper, stranger emotions that
blossom later in life, and "Away From Her" implicitly proves his
point. I can't remember the last time the movies yielded up a love
story so painful, so tender and so true.

"Away From Her" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has
sexual references and complicated, adult situations.

AWAY FROM HER

Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Sarah Polley; written by Ms. Polley, based on the short
story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" by Alice Munro; director of
photography, Luc Montpellier; edited by David Wharnsby; music by
Jonathan Goldsmith; production designer, Kathleen Climie; produced by
Daniel Iron, Simone Urdl and Jennifer Weiss; released by Lionsgate.
Running time: 110 minutes.

WITH: Julie Christie (Fiona), Gordon Pinsent (Grant), Olympia Dukakis
(Marian), Kristen Thompson (Kristy), Michael Murphy (Aubrey) and Wendy
Crewson (Madeleine).