As the opening credits roll it is evident that Away From Her is not going to be a happy film. Fiona (Julie Christie) is washing and drying dishes after supper with her husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent). He dries a frying pan, hands it to Fiona and she, acting ever so naturally, opens the refrigerator and puts the pan in with the milk, eggs and leftovers. She returns to Grant who has been watching her intently and announces, ever so naturally again, that she will start a fire in the fireplace. Dutifully, Grant retrieves the frying pan from the frig and stores it in its proper place. Welcome to a cinematic study of Alzheimer’s.

Sarah Polley, the twenty-eight old Canadian director, has adapted an Alice Munro short story (The Bear Came Over the Mountain) and created an engrossing, perceptive study of a man and wife faced with the inexplicableness of a disease marching unfettered through society. To the director’s credit, she collaborated with Munro who authored the screenplay. Munro stays close to her written words, co-opting much of her story’s dialogue word for word and creating new dialogue from narrative descriptions in the story. What Munro alludes to in the story she alludes to in the film. What is explicit in the story is explicit in the film. Munro was happy with her story, originally published in The New Yorker magazine in late 1999, and translates it honestly. The viewer will be more than happy with her adaptation to the screen. It is high praise indeed to say the film is more artistic than the story. It packs the punch the written word doesn’t achieve, much of this is due to the exquisite acting.

So many adaptations of films from novels tear the story apart or twist the ending for some imagined mass appeal. The Handmaiden’s Tale a distopian novel by Margaret Atwood, another Canadian, comes to mind. The film butchered the novel.

No so here. Munro, thankfully, has kept her hands on the reigns of directors. Munro believes fiercely in her story so there is no reason to change anything, only to interpret for another media. She omits minor details from the written story and develops characters but she is always faithful to her original creation in the written word. The director introduces a flash forward technique that works effectively in the film and creates tension as the viewer becomes gradually aware of what the resolution will be.

The acting is superb. Julie Christie exudes an eerie charm as she gradually loses her mind. Gordon Pinsent, as her husband, firmly convinces the viewer he is finally and totally in love with his wife. The supporting cast, the majority is Canadian (as is Munro), transform their stereotypical roles and imbue them with distinctive believability. There are too many to mention but the entire cast feeds off each other like a Shakespeare company who know both the story and each other intimately.

Michael Murphy playing the role of Aubrey, a resident of a nursing home, has no dialogue but a sneer here, a glare there, and a swipe of the arm reveal the fragile emotional state belying his silence. Olympia Dukakis, as Aubrey’s husband, begins as a stoic realist but gradually opens up her own tortured soul. Sports lovers especially will relish a short scene when a hockey game is on television in the nursing home. Anyone who has experienced the decline of a person with Alzheimer’s or has stepped across the threshold of a nursing home will murmur to themselves throughout the film, “How true. How true. My God, how true.”

The entire film, filmed in the province of Ontario in Canada during the winter, reveals the soul of Munro. She is unabashedly Canadian and every story she has written has mined the depths of the Canadian soul. This time, it turns out, the Canadian soul is the soul of mankind. The winter landscape, with the snow as a loneliness metaphor, works well with the pedigree of Fiona whose family emigrated from Iceland. Christie’s white-gray hair and strong facial features plus her choice of white clothing complement the snow theme nicely. It is a cold world she is entering.

The following paragraphs are SPOILERS. ALERT. ALERT. They contain a great deal of detail about one aspect of the plot that will get viewers debating. With that disclaimer, the next paragraphs.

E. M. Forster remarks in his literary study Aspects of the Novel the difference between a story and a plot with this example. “’The king died and then the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief,’ is a plot.”

In the film, the nursing home maintains a policy of no visitors, including relatives, for thirty days. Not realistic, perhaps (I have never encountered it), but it is the plot device that delivers the dilemma. After the thirty days, Fiona is a changed woman who doesn’t know her husband Grant at all but surprisingly has initiated a romantic relationship with a fellow resident, Aubrey. She remembers him, incorrectly, as an infatuated schoolmate from her youth. Grant thinks Fiona’s affection is a pretense, perhaps to spite him for his own infidelities during the course of their marriage. The debate is whether Fiona, in her state of vast forgetfulness, would possess the ability to dote so lovingly and with such detail. If her behavior is implausible, then the crux of the film is suspect.

I would argue that her romantic involvement with Aubrey is a distinct plot device. Whether it is possible to exhibit this type of behavior in the real world is immaterial. The nursing home characters, the administrator and a nurse Kristy, accept this behavior as a given. Nevertheless, as a film, this is fiction and in fiction the reader (viewer) must be able to access and understand the causality of the characters’ behavior. Fiona displays multiple symptoms of dementia that overwhelmingly convince the viewer she is ill. Her behavior is no ploy and her terror is quite real.

I accept this plot device, the romantic infatuation; it is the vehicle the author (Munro) and the director (Polley) use to plum the depths of the characters’ behavior. Grant is remorseful but cannot go back in time to rectify his mistakes. He must suffer something he never anticipated. In his lonely present without his wife and friend (hence the film title), he must make a decision that will make his wife happy but leave him despondent. As the nurse says to him in the film, “It is never too late to become what you might have been.” This is, after all, a morality tale of modern life.

No film is perfect. Two short scenes (not in the short story, was Munro sleeping?) poke fun at American culture (films) and politics (Vietnam and Iraq). Both scenes are self-indulgent and unnecessary and intrude the flow of the narrative.

Highly recommended and perhaps it is too early to whisper the “O” word but something and/or someone in this film should be nominated. The acting is superior, the screenplay is exquisite, and the film is memorable.


Recommended: Yes

Movie Mood: Serious Movie
Viewing Method: Sneak Preview at My Local Theater
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Nothing