2007: Away From Her

Away From Her (Polley, 2007) 9/10

The phrase “happily ever after” is often the prerequisite coda inserted at the end of fictionalized romances. Together these three words denote the promise of eternal joy and ceaseless love uninterrupted by life’s cruel realities and hardships.

Unfortunately, life rarely exudes a fairytale quality equipped with blissful endings. As seen in Sarah Polley’s sober feature-length debut Away From Her, illness and the stresses of time regularly place their own influential imprint on life.

Adapted by screenwriter and director Sarah Polley from Canadian author Alice Munro’s short story The Bear That Came Over The Mountain, Away From Her focuses on the effect of Alzheimer’s disease on a forty-four year old marriage. The film stars Julie Christie as Fiona Andersson, a sixty-something housewife who enjoys cross-country skiing on the frozen lake adjacent to her cottage in southern Ontario’s Brant County and reading Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler aloud with her husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent), a retired professor.

The marriage has had its difficulties, but the latest test facing the Anderssons is irresolvable. Slowly, but surely, Fiona has started to show the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. After placing her life in danger on a wintry evening, the couple decide, albeit with reluctance from Grant, to place her in a nursing home. Yet during his first visit, Grant begins to question his decisions, as the Fiona he once knew begins to disappear.

A remarkably assured and mature work, Away From Her is at its core a heartbreaking study of the dissolution of a relationship. The two incredible lead performances by Christie and Pinsent are both restrained and sombre. There are neither tears nor fits of despair. The performances are composed, calm and pensive. The film’s aching sorrow is induced through the blank stares, crestfallen eyes and quiet moments of reflection administered by Pinsent and Christie. The former in particular witnesses the dissolving marriage with incredible poignancy; and is left with only a sequence of fleeting memories deposited in his memory banks to sustain its existence.

Viewed as a stranger by his own wife, Pinsent’s Grant literally becomes an observer. His heavy heart is filled with frustration, loneliness, anger, guilt, regret and denial. Through Polley’s reserved approach, the inner turmoil of her characters is filtered through solemn passages in which the fragments of memory binding the couple disintegrate and fritter away. Via her sensitive and intelligent direction, Polley manages to render these emotions authentic through her resistance to a melodramatic model in favour of the modes of contemplation often found in Ingmar Bergman’s chamber dramas.

Aside from a fractured, elliptical timeline, Sarah Polley shuns visual flair for emotional economy. Nor, does the young Canadian director attempt to manipulate the audience with sentiment and sympathy. Instead Polley’s delicate and ambiguous conclusions stress the possibility of hope existing in moments of despair: actions evidenced through Grant’s budding friendships with a pragmatic nurse (Kristen Thomson) and Marian (Olympia Dukakis) a woman whose own husband is suffering from a terminal illness in the same hospital.

Thus by its final moments, Away From Her in its own way becomes a wellspring of optimism and redemption. The film’s closing scene certainly offers an indefinite assortment of hypotheses toward its outcome. Yet, whichever way one perceives the film’s open-ending, Away From Her still stands as a beautiful treatise on the love’s joys, sacrifices and adversities. Buoyed with profound and mature reflections on the nature of love and relationships, Away From Her is a stunning and achingly tender portrayal of the deep connections binding two people together.