Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
The
Long Goodbye
(Away from Her, 6/11/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Where
the other feature in town directed by a young female newcomer, Adrienne
Shelly's Waitress, displays an almost unbearable lightness, Sarah
Polley's Away from Her is no souffle. In fact, Polley's film
represents the kind of mature drama—we're talking pensive, Bergmanesque
intensity here—that Hollywood has completely abdicated and even
independents rarely risk.
In short, it is a miracle.
Based on the Alice Munro short story
"The Bear Came Over the Mountain," Away concerns an aging
academic couple trying to hold on to their dignity when their world
goes awry. The wife, Fiona, (Julie Christie) can no longer remember
where the cutlery goes in the kitchen, and stashes the frying pan in
the freezer. Simple words are starting to elude her. When she is diagnosed
with Alzheimer's disease, her husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) seems to
have more trouble accepting her illness than she does. With her faculties
slipping away, Fiona has to convince Grant to put her in an assisted-living
center. She then pushes him away for the sake of his own happiness.
If all this isn't poignant enough,
Grant must then stand by as his wife takes an almost maternal attachment
to another patient, Aubrey (Michael Murphy). Despite his jealousy, he
is alarmed when Aubrey is removed from the institution and Fiona takes
a severe downturn. This forces Grant to appeal to the other man's wife
(Olympia Dukakis) to bring Aubrey back, for Fiona's sake.
Polley ably avoids the cheap sentimentality
and lurid theatrics one might expect in a disease-of-the-week TV movie.
Instead, she offers glimpses of prospects far more frightening. Aging
and Alzheimer's have similar effects in this story, inflicting an ever-rising
number of indignities that make the heart ache for the minor pleasures
of the past—frying pans in freezers included. In this regard, the
film's pitch-perfect tone more than compensates for its few stylistic
lapses, such as too many shots of people sipping from mugs while gazing
pensively out windows, and the overly Windham Hill-ish soundtrack.
Julie Christie, who hasn't had a
role this big or meaty since the autumn of her diva days (Shampoo,
Don't Look Now, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in the 1970's) is a remarkable
presence here. Not so many actresses in their mid-sixties can manage
to look so good on a sixty-foot movie screen; possibly even fewer can
invite us to read so much into the light (or absence of light) in her
eyes. She's so good, in fact, that her character has more life at her
chronic worst than the always-ruppled and frazzled Pinsent. "I'm
going," she says when pleased to remember some tender detail, "but
I'm not gone yet."
The bigger question, though, is
why young Miss Polley-who was all of 25 or 26 when she made the film-has
any business telling this kind of story with such assurance. Though
there is no shortage of talent in the movie business, that talent almost
always strives to seem younger than it is, not older. Granted, Alice
Munro's stories can be inspiring things, and Polley has long experience
working as an actress for such thoughtful directors as Atom Egoyan (The
Sweet Hereafter) and Michael Winterbottom (The Claim). But
short stories aren't movies, and resumes don't make the thousand and
one decisions that add up to a film this successful. Better see this
one before it's gone.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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