Away From Her is Sarah Polley's feature film directorial debut but her skill belies her inexperience. This artfully directed film is beautiful, descriptive, emotional, wrenching, sensitive, gorgeous, and very very very sad. It's also very very very long, even though it's only 110 minutes.
The action takes place on a wintry lake in southern Ontario. Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona (Julie Christie) are coming to grips with her pending decline from Alzheimer's. The film takes us through the slow process of her memory losses at home until she ultimately becomes dangerous to herself and has to move into an assisted living center. From there she befriends another patient and Grant (oddly) befriends that patients wife, Marion, piercingly portrayed by Olympia Dukakis. All of the performances in this film are of the caliber we've come to expect, and I won't be surprised if Oscar remembers Julie Christie next year with at least a nod.
There are some peculiarities to the story, or maybe its telling, which was faithfully adapted from an Alice Munro novel. My own Grandmother's decline in real life from the point where we first meet Fiona to her state at end of the film took place over the course of about nine years. In this film it happens in one winter, maybe even during the same snow storm. Also, the love stories seem strangely abrupt, and the film tries to explain that it's okay if the person you love that loves you goes on to love someone else because they can't remember you and your love should let that love live because it's making the one you love happy, and that's love. I get it, but I'm still not sure why Grant hooks up with Marion, except out of loneliness, and well, I guess that's the reason (her look of maddening guilt after they make love moved me to tears more than anything else in the film). It just felt weird to see Grant and Marion together when Grant spends 110 minutes, er, 109 minutes pining for Fiona. The other interesting choice was we never see Grant cry--not even a tear.
Away From Her is affecting, especially if you know anyone from a mature generation who's degenerating before your eyes. But it is too long -- the energy of the film disappears as Fiona declines. Still, it's worth the price of admission to support the Canadians for taking a risk on the subject matter (not exactly a commercial thriller), to support Polley so she can continue to create interesting, emotional films, and to see Julie Christie in yet another amazing performance.
