Sarah Polley (2006)
In the space of a short story, Alice Munro is able to capture a whole life or the progress of relationships that last a lifetime. She handles the passage of time in a way I have to call magical because I can’t see the techniques that are being used to create the effects. Away From Her, which Sarah Polley adapted from Munro’s story The Bear Came Over the Mountain, contains a fine performance from Julie Christie as a woman with Alzheimer’s but it doesn’t reproduce the virtues of Munro’s writing and it’s not really very good, although I kept wanting it to be. You’d never think of an Alice Munro story thin but Away From Her feels as if there’s not enough material to sustain a feature-length movie. Polley’s sensitive approach may be one of the problems – the story is more disturbing and has much more friction than the film. Fiona Anderson (Christie) realises that she’s reached the point where she needs full-time care; she’s more willing to face up to the prospect than her husband, Grant (Gordon Pinsent), a retired academic. The Andersons, who live in Brant County, Ontario, have been married many years, although Grant has been unfaithful with female students during that time. The couple’s worlds appear to revolve around each other – there’s no evidence of any children or other family. The rules of the nursing home where Fiona goes to live require an initial thirty-day ‘settling in’ period, during which new residents are not allowed any visitors. By the time Grant comes to see Fiona after this enforced separation, she’s developed an attachment to another patient, a man called Aubrey (Michael Murphy). Away From Her is about a man losing his wife, in effect, twice. And Grant comes to believe, in some part of his mind, that Fiona, though she seemed affably tolerant of his affairs at the time, is, in some part of what remains of her mind, getting her own back.
At first, Away From Her comes across as rather a generic treatment of an Alzheimer’s sufferer and her partner – a montage of moments of embarrassing or upsetting or unknowing forgetfulness, accompanied by Jonathan Goldsmith’s wan music. A short dinner-party sequence suggests how Fiona’s Alzheimer’s is eroding the Andersons’ social life but Sarah Polley doesn’t attempt to give any sense of the relentless and abrading quality of the domestic routine, which must be one of the most upsetting things for a partner – finding not only that the person you love is disappearing but that love is increasingly displaced by feelings of irritation. Although he gives a skilful and intelligent performance, Gordon Pinsent isn’t that strong a personality on screen and he’s on screen for more time than anyone in the film. Grant Anderson isn’t a likeable man more because Pinsent is somewhat closed off than through his communicating the man’s selfishness. By contrast, Olympia Dukakis, as Aubrey’s wife Marian, whom Grant visits and with whom he eventually has a short-lived sexual relationship, always seems eager to do more than the script allows. A sensitive but plain-speaking care worker called Kristy (Kristen Thomsen) is an example of a character who, although minor in terms of how much she’s given to say, registers strongly in the hands of Alice Munro but who is stretched thin in Polley’s adaptation. Wendy Crewson, as the superintendent of the nursing home, overdoes smiley businesslike insensitivity.
In the end, Away From Her is worth seeing only for Julie Christie – but she really is worth seeing. Christie has always been much more impressive to watch than to listen to on screen: this pays dividends here in more ways than one. The discontinuity of Fiona’s mind means there are rarely too many lines for Christie to handle; she realises Fiona’s erratic thought processes, and the words and looks that reflect them, with piercing precision. Her eyes express shock as well as sadness: Fiona knows that a large part of her has been burgled. The snow-covered Ontario landscapes, in combination with Christie’s apprehension of vacancy, recall the closing couplet of Philip Larkin’s ‘The Winter Palace’:
‘Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.’
Julie Christie is still amazingly beautiful but there’s a poignancy seeing her in this role for a film lover of my generation, for whom she has always been there. The actress (Stacey LaBerge) who appears as the young Fiona, as glimpsed in Grant’s memory, not only lacks the ‘spark of life’ which he remembers about the girl who became his wife. She seems entirely redundant for anyone who can call to mind the young Julie Christie.
19 August 2012
