Sarah Polley: AWAY FROM HER

[mouton]

AWAY FROM HER
Written and Directed by Sarah Polley

Grant: Fiona, is there any way you can let this go?
Fiona: If I let it go, it will only hit me harder when I bump into it again.

A couple washes up after dinner. He washes while she dries. They savour the memory of the delicious dinner they just shared. They are smiling and in love after forty-four years together. In a moment of silence, he casually hands her the frying pan he has just cleaned. She dries it with her towel, walks to the freezer and puts it inside. She exits the room as if nothing out of the ordinary has just happened. All he can do is watch, if his intentions are to be sensitive. This is the context in which we are introduced to Grant and Fiona (Gordon Pinsett and Julie Christie) in the first feature film adapted and directed by Canadian actress Sarah Polley, AWAY FROM HER. Polley brings unapologetic honesty and sympathy to the lives of these two characters. After a lifetime together, they will be torn apart by Alzheimer’s. Neither can do anything to stop it. He can only watch her mind disappear while she tries to enjoy the undetermined lucid time she has left. It is Polley’s delicate and respectful hand that guides the viewer to see past the surface of misplaced kitchen apparel and see the longing for tenderness that is had between as it lingers longer than fading memories.

Memory comes in and out in AWAY FROM HER. With the image often filling with white and veering on blurry like a blinding snowstorm, Polley sets the tone from the start. Memory is a hazy concept. Alzheimer’s is a cruel game that has Fiona having difficulty maintaining her short-term memory, like why she left the house or common words, while some of the most painful memories in her life seem like they will never be forgotten. Her story unfolds as she decides to admit herself to a retirement facility so that her husband needn’t be responsible for her. This particular “home” enforces a policy where new residents are not allowed to have any contact with the loved ones they left behind for the first thirty days after they are admitted. When Grant is finally able to return to the residence, it isn’t clear whether Fiona even recognizes him and worse yet, she has found comfort in the company of another man (Michael Murphy). As painful as this reality is, Polley cuts away to another time and place throughout this build, allowing us a glimpse into where Grant will end up as a result of all this change. As a result, the film feels interrupted. It is one of few mistakes made by this novice filmmaker but fortunately not one that makes the film any less painful.

Polley directs three beautifully nuanced performances from her leads. As Grant, Pinsett is bewildered, stubborn and hopeful depending on the moment. Despite all of his frustration, he is constantly searching for understanding and resolve for the memories even he has difficulty letting go of. Olympia Dukakis joins the cast as Marian, the wife of Aubrey, the man Fiona befriends in the residence. She is a tough woman, brass because she has to be. For Grant, she represents what he could have become had it been decided that he would care for his wife himself. Her life is one that was surrendered to supporting her husband through his illness, forcing personal happiness to be removed as a possibility. Naturally, given the nature of the part, it is Christie that pulls the viewer deep into a mind that is falling away. In one scene, Grant brings her home for a day. She marvels at how it was kept so well after all this time. Though the home she is seeing was her own for over twenty years, she looks on it as if it belonged to someone else. The way her eyes take in the surroundings, an environment that she should know intimately, suggests a sense of attachment intrinsically linked with a saddened detachment. She should know this place, these things, and one some level she does. She does not understand why she should feel a sense of familiarity, just that it is so. It is as though memories flood back to her but they aren’t her own.

AWAY FROM HER is a fantastic first film from a talented Canadian actress with great promise as both a perceptive writer and skilled director. It is also a lesson in patience and learning to let go. Not for the viewer but for those onscreen. Grant must always exercise restraint while allowing the love of his life to find solace in another man. After all, what matters most is that she be at peace. As big a task as this is, Fiona must do even more. She must accept that the life she knew is behind her and that the one ahead of her is new, necessary and one that might fade away from her as quickly as it happens to her.

www.blacksheepreviews.blogspot.com

[Chris Knipp]

Just opened locally. Will see it very soon. I don't relish the idea of a story about Alzheimer's disease, but I do like Julie Christie.

Your "blogspot" is great-looking, by the way.

[oscar jubis]

AWAY FROM HER (Canada)

On the plane back from Iceland after shooting Hal Hartley's No such Thing, actress Sarah Polley read Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain". She was fascinated by it and kept seeing the face of Julie Christie (also in the cast of Hartley's film) in the character of Fiona. Polley wrote and directed two short films and later appeared with Christie in Isabel Coixet's The Secret Life of Words. By then she had acquired the rights to Munro's story and written a script that is both faithful to the source and daringly expansive.

Basically, the story concerns how the memory loss experienced by Fiona as a symptom of Alzheimer's Disease affects her relationship with Grant, her husband for almost fifty years. The narrative arc of Away From Her is subservient to the capricious and unpredictable course of the disease. The decades of history between the couple can no longer be shared dependably because the afflicted one has only a vague and intermittent recollection of it. Away From Her opens at a point in which Fiona and Grant are grudgingly and painfully considering her commitment to a nursing home. A turning point in the film takes place when Grant returns to the facility after a 30-day separation and finds Fiona in a relationship with Aubrey, another resident, and unable to identify him as her husband. A nurse named Kristina becomes his guide and confidant. More significantly, Grant seeks out Marian, Aubrey's wife, who has her reasons not to leave Aubrey at the nursing home permanently.

Polley has taken a story that follows a linear chronology and divided it into three alternating temporal threads. She uses brief flashbacks (shot with a hand-cranked Paillard camera by Luc Montpellier) to visualize Grant and Fiona's memories of their youth and wide-lensed 35 mm for a more recent cherished memory of the couple skiing under a full moon. Polley's most brilliant coup as a writer is to manufacture mystery by flashing forward to Grant driving to Marian's house and meeting her before we know how she fits into the story. Julie Christie is, to no one's surprise, absolutely brilliant and perhaps never better. Yet Away From Her is a showcase for Gordon Pinset, an actor/writer/director who has won three Canadian Academy awards for performances in relatively obscure films. Pinset takes his protagonic role far beyond what's on the page with a minutely detailed performance free of mannerisms.

I first became aware of Sarah Polley's immense acting chops in Atom Egoyan's Exotica, in which Polley had a minor but significant role. Then Egoyan gave her the main role in The Sweet Hereafter and her reputation as a first-class actress was cemented. To Egoyan, who is the executive producer of Away From Her, Polley's revelation as an auteur is a natural and anticipated progression, based on her behavior on the sets and her unusual interest in all aspects of production during the shoots. To any passionate film lover, her emergence as a visionary writer/director is a most welcome surprise. Polley has tried for years to get financing for a project based on an original script about a 12 year-old actress cast in a TV series. After Away from Her, how can she possibly be denied?

[Chris Knipp]

Sarah Polley: Away from Her (2006)

A somewhat sweetened hereafter

Review by Chris Knipp

Here is another film about family life based on a work of short fiction, this time Alice Munro's December 1999 New Yorker story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain,"* which looks at the disruption of a long marriage caused when Fiona, a woman in Canada whose mother was Icelandic, is afflicted with Alzheimer's. Richard Eyre's 2001 Iris grew out of John Bayley's book about his remarkable wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch, and the way when she got Alzheimer's he cared for her to the very end. Munro's short story instead deals with a lady who insists on going into an institution and it focuses on how her husband struggles to cope when that happens. It's a place called Meadowlake, where the rule is family members can't visit new residents for the first thirty days. When Grant, the husband (Gordon Pinsent), finally gets to see her again, his wife Fiona (Julie Christie) has latched onto somebody else, a man called Aubrey (Michael Murphy). Grant patiently makes daily visits to Meadowlake and tries to gain Fiona's attention, but remains painfully excluded not just by her fading mind but by her new loyalty to another person.

Brain-damaged but not through Alzheimer's, Aubrey, it turns out, is only at Meadowlake temporarily, and when his wife comes to retrieve him Fiona has become depressed and taken to her bed. In Munro's story, Grant is present when Aubrey leaves, a moment rather blurred in Away from Her. The film presents sequences of events that are straightforward in the story in such overlapping fashion that for a while viewers may feel they too are getting Alzheimer's. While extremely faithful to Munro's text in other ways, Polley's screenplay fiddles with its time-scheme unnecessarily.

What's clear about Grant in both versions is, he's fighting to hold onto his wife. He never wanted her to go away in the first place. Because memory loss is partial and sporadic in early-stage Alzheimer's he's the more able to think -- at least for a while -- that her tricky recall is only a game she's playing. When the departure of Aubrey leads to a dramatic decline in Fiona and she may be transferred to the second floor, the place reserved for residents who've completely lost it, Grant finds out where Aubrey's wife lives and goes to meet Marian (Olympia Dukakis). He wants to persuade her to let Aubrey revisit Meadowlake, hoping that will revive Fiona. Marian refuses. She thinks he's a "jerk." (In the story it's he who only suspects she'll think that; but in the movie, more literal in its use of some details, she says it aloud to herself the minute he's out the door.)

Polley has somewhat enlarged the bare-bones picture of the institution in Munro's story, nicely expanding the character of the nurse Kristy (Kristen Thomson), Grant's only ally at Meadowlake, and introducing a little comedy in the character of a former sports announcer who perfectly narrates a TV hockey game and even booms out descriptions of the dining room menu. As a picture of the experience of turning over a loved one to such a place, however, both story and film could use more practical details. The film especially needs more, to counteract its tendency to overplay its emotional shallows.

The fact that Grant, a retired professor, was a philanderer who had affairs with his female students is something we learn in the film through dialogue when he's driving Fiona to Meadowlake. And now a surprise comes up which may bring his skills as a seducer into play: Marian calls him and asks him out on a sort of date. This gives Grant a wedge. Later he brings Aubrey to visit Fiona, but we never see that. We just see her greet Grant again, up out of her bed and somewhat revived, but still diminished. The final moment is a sweet one in Munro's story as in the film -- where Fiona has taken on a vague, Ophelia-like manner, confused but a touching blend of the amorous and the courtly.

Sarah Polley, previously well known as an actress (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, eXistenZ) who herself wrote this adaptation as well as directed, has followed Munro's story closely, and yet the effect is very different. The story is more cool and acerbic. This comes through the realism with which Grant's past infidelities are viewed; through Marian's hardheaded and practical view of life; and through the way the story progresses as a series of rapid steps. The movie, reducing some information about the principals but expanding background details, dwells more on each scene. It's full of emotional moments the story doesn't dwell upon.

Gordon Pinsent is a Canadian like Munro and Polley -- and Atom Agoyan, something of a mentor for Polley, who produced. Pinsent's Grant fits Munro's conception beautifully: he's suffering, but as a Meadowlake woman says in the movie, he's a "charmer," and he even looks like someone who'd have taught Norse mythology and Anglo-Saxon, as the story and film specify. Olympia Dukakis as Marian is a good approximation, but a little one-note, compared to Alice Munro's tough, wily character. In the story, Fiona is one of those "few who've kept their beauty whole, though shadowy," and that's where Julie Christie is an inspired choice. But despite Christie's fine performance, it's part of the general sweetening and emotional in-dwelling of the film versus Munro's story. "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" achieves a balance of practical facts and painful feelings that gets tilted too far into sentiment and gloom in the film with a corresponding loss of pungency. Nonetheless Away from Her is a precocious directorial debut for Sarah Polley, who's only 28.
_________
*The story is available online here. (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1999/12/27/1999_12_27_110_TNY_LIBRY_000019900)

[mouton]

Hey Chris ... sounds like it was a general disappointment for you. I haven't read the short story but would have to agree with you on the overall sweetening of this film. Many choices seem far too simple and self serving rather than authentic. It is not a bad film; I believe Polley has promise as both a writer and director. It is one of those movies that you can feel how and where it could have been better while it's happening. That always brings me to a bigger disappointment because you want for the film to be all that much better.

Oh, I love the Somewhat Sweetened Hereafter subtitle. You witty boy, you.

[mouton]

Hey Oscar ... nicely written piece. I love how I can learn behind-the-scenes tidbits in your work. I too thought that Gordon Pinsett is the understated winner of the film, outside of Polley. Julie Christie is wonderful but as you said, who expected otherwise? That being said, you allude to the flash forwards being a crafty tool to build mystery and I would have to disagree. I found them to be awkwardly placed and paced. At first, I found the interruption intriguing. Then they started to come more frequently and they would be gone again before much was established. I found them ultimately distracting and felt they weakened the film overall.

[oscar jubis]

Thanks for your nice comments, mouton. We had divergent reactions to the fractured chronology, didn't we? Well, you call it a "fantastic first film" and I'm glad you enjoyed it. Away From Her happens to be my favorite film in English that I've seen this year. I certainly plan to watch it again. I wonder if it's still playing at the theater here, if not I'll wait for the dvd. I feel inadequate regarding my previous lack of exposure to Mr. Pinsent. Many of his highly acclaimed performances are not available on video. I plan to purchase a video of John and the Missus, which I've been able to track down. It's based on his own book, which he adapted and directed. He won a Genie for Best Actor for his performance.

[Chris Knipp]

i agree with you mouton, except I wouldn't want to say the film was a general disappointment to me --- but a partial one. This is because despite the misfiring we agree on of the fractured time scheme and the sweetening of the story original, it's still a very promising directorial beginning for Polley, and a lot of the acting is terrific. I agree with Oscar that Pinsent is a secret too closely guarded by the Canadians--obviously a multi-talented guy -- it's surprising we havent' known about him before this. In some ways Canada is a black hole for the US--whose main newspapers have recently withdrawn all their Canada correspondents, as if to say, "We don't need to know anything about you." And we very much do.