Away from Her

Away from Her

In the first years of this century, “Away from Her” is my fifth film about Alzheimer’s, and the best, although only one of them has been bad. It tells a story of a marriage that strays out of the mind of the wife, and of the husband’s efforts to come to terms with that fact, using sympathy and tenderness towards its characters.

Two Canadian women are responsible for this movie: Sarah Polley (born 1979), the writer and director; and Alice Munro (born 1931), author of the short story on which it is based. In her short fiction, Munro has a gift for summoning up a lifetime in images and dialogue of almost alarming insight. Polley takes the material with her camera, finds an eerie rightness in her casting, bathes everything in the mercy of simple truth.

Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent play Fiona and Grant Anderson, who have been married more than forty years mostly happily but stumbling here and there. They have that look of beauty in old age they had in youth; though now weathered like a park bench that looks more inviting after some seasons in the sun. She has Alzheimer’s disease; we learn this early on are spared coy opening scenes where she appears healthy then starts to slip when she puts a frying pan into a cupboard.

They’re retired; live in a cottage overlooking fields perfect for cross-country skiing. In their cold-weather gear they look robust; when they come inside from their daily skiing they look so cozy with each other it makes us feel cozy too. Just as models in plus-size catalogs always look thin, models in retirement ads always look like these two: youthful, athletic, foxy.

But Fiona has too much respect for herself or pity for Grant to put him through what seems her inevitable decline. On her own initiative she checks into an attractive nursing home nearby; he drives her there, recalling their earlier adventures along the same route. An administrator explains that Grant won’t be able to visit for thirty days; it’s easier if new patients are cut off from family while they adjust.

This is not seen in darkness and shadows or the winter gloom and night visions, but in bright focus. “The overarching palette that we had was this incredibly strong, sometimes blinding, winter sunlight that should be in every frame,” Polley told Andrew O’Hehir of Salon. “I didn’t want the visual style to call too much attention to itself. I felt like this needed to be a simple and elegant film, and it had to have a certain grace.”

How can you do that by narrowing your palette instead of expanding it? I thought of Bergman’s “Winter Light” (1962), which bathes despair in pitiless light. Here despair belongs to Grant. After his 30 days away he finds Fiona almost melded with another patient, the mute Aubrey (Michael Murphy). She cares for him like her own patient, seems indifferent if not vague about Grant. Is she getting back at him for infidelities earlier in their marriage? That would be a kind of relief next to her forgetting him which cuts him deeper.

We get married because we need witnesses to our lives, says the character played by Susan Sarandon in Audrey Wells’ much-quoted dialogue for “Shall We Dance” (2004). With each person’s death our shared memories grow private; when we die they become private too. In some sense those remembered events never happened. Death wipes the slate all at once, a mercy compared with the light of recognition fading slowly from the eyes of an Alzheimer’s-stricken spouse. Remember when we first made love? You don’t? Who is “we”? What is “love”?

As it happens Aubrey has a wife named Marian (Olympia Dukakis), and Grant visits her, wondering at first if she might consider relocating her husband somewhere else. Or whatever. They talk across her kitchen table; Dukakis delivers implacable truth. She looks at reality without blinking. That’s all for the plot.

The other recent Alzheimer’s movies are Bille August’s “A Song for Martin” (2002), Nick Cassavetes’ “The Notebook” (2004) and Erik Van Looy’s “The Memory of a Killer” (2005). Very good, all three; maybe the third-best of the year. Then there was Richard Eyre’s “Iris” (2001), about the decline into Alzheimer’s of the novelist Iris Murdoch, which I thought cheated because it was too much about young Iris.

Yes, “The Notebook” also moved from present to past, and supplied well-timed but unlikely moments when the patient’s mind cleared in perfect clarity and memory. But that was a romance. “A Song for Martin” is about a couple who meet late in life, fall passionately in love and then have clouds roll between them. And “Memory of a Killer,” starring Jan Decleir in an unforgettable performance as an aging Belgian hit man who wants to retire, undertakes one last job against his own fading lights to bring about an extraordinary outcome. Rent it.

The film industry has a habit of connecting Alzheimer’s disease to a narrative. Sarah Polley’s “Away From Her” is one of these films, and it is devastatingly beautiful. It does not try to do anything else but watch Alzheimer’s ruin a person’s mind. That is usually how it goes, with the disease. No great love stories are relived in their memories during their last days; no books are written; no flashbacks are as fun for them as they are for us. They just go away, further and further until, at some point, like they’ve fallen into some black hole or other, nothing can come back from them.

Everything here is tightly reined in performance-wise: There can be no false awarenesses peeking out from behind the eyes (at least not inadvertently). Julie Christie must never seem to be perceiving more than she lets on day by day that she knows about things around her. Gordon Pinsent cannot appear able to feel anything like revenge or consolation or contrition or anything except absolute loss. Olympia Dukakis cannot appear to deceive herself for one moment. Michael Murphy cannot seem to understand his own behavior.

Kristen Thomson is the one character who gets what’s going on around her Kristy, the kind nurse who gives Grant practical advice without being able to help him with his grief; she has empathy with him and pity and routines and treatments and progressions, but none of this seems any good against his sorrow because it isn’t. She talks directly about Alzheimer’s, using its name: “She knows how Alzheimer’s is,” Munro writes of Kristy after describing her blank gaze.

Sarah Polley always had a certain presence as an actress (see “The Sweet Hereafter,” “My Life Without Me”), even when very young; now still quite young (born 1979) she becomes here a director with unnaturally sure command over almost impossibly dense material, a film that testifies as much to her strength of character as it does to her skill. Whoever could read Munro’s story and think they could make a movie out of it, and then go ahead and do it (and especially if they were ever right), deserves some kind of prize for courage alone.

Watch Away from Her For Free On Gomovies.