In a refreshingly direct, unassuming manner, "Away From Her" considers two great human mysteries: the persistence of love and the workings of the brain. It takes the twilight of a long, mostly happy marriage as a vantage point from which to look back at youth and look forward into the waiting darkness. The first feature written and directed by Sarah Polley, one of the most interesting actresses to come out of Canada in the past decade, the film is by turns sharp and somber, alive to the lacerations of ordinary experience and quietly attentive to grand absurdities and small instances of grace.
"A little bit of grace" is what Fiona, an elegant woman with Alzheimer s disease, counsels in response to its ravages.
And grace is what Julie Christie, who plays Fiona, manifests in every scene, even as Fiona feels the tissue of her self begin to crumble and fade. When we first encounter Fiona and her husband, Grant (Gordon Pinsent), they are living in a roomy old house on the shore of a lake in Ontario.
Soft-spoken and gray-haired, they are a picture of marital ease and contentment: sexually fulfilled, easy in each other s company, instinctively choosing kindness over recrimination.
When Fiona s lapses of memory, initially comical - she puts a frying pan in the freezer, and forgets the word "wine" - start to become worrisome, it is she, partly out of consideration for Grant, who initiates the series of decisions that take her from the house by the lake to an assisted-living facility called Meadowlake.
Like "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," the Alice Munro story on which it is based, "Away From Her" uses fractured chronology to convey the splintering of experience caused by Fiona s loss of memory.
(The film is being released this month in the United States, France and Norway; it has already been released in Britain.)
The progress of Alzheimer s - "progress" is one of the medical euphemisms that Grant, a retired English professor, takes bitter note of - is cruelly and mercifully uneven. "I seem to be disappearing bit by bit," says Fiona, and as she does, she begins to lose Grant as well.
Or, perhaps, to abandon him. In conversational allusions and flickering, grainy flashbacks, we discover a long-buried crack in their seemingly perfect relationship, a period many years before when Grant, tempted by his female students and the permissive mores of the time, had been unfaithful. Is Fiona s sudden, strange attachment to a fellow Meadowlake patient named Aubrey (Michael Murphy) a manifestation of her disease, or a sly way of punishing Grant for his lapses 20 years before?
When Grant comes bearing flowers, she does not really seem to know who he is. She recognizes him from one day to the next but treats him with wary civility.
Four decades ago, Christie was one of the most beautiful women in movies, poised, a bit melancholy and heart-stoppingly sexy.
Not much has changed. The sketches Aubrey draws of Fiona magically (or tactfully) erase the features of age, but those features are superficial in any case.
Pinsent, a marvelously subtle actor with a rich voice and a shaggy charisma, looks at her with the eyes of a man who can t believe his good fortune, even as his luck takes a bad turn.
And Grant, like many of the men in Munro s fiction, is a compound of attractive and appalling traits. He was clearly appealing enough for Fiona to fall in love with and decent enough not to leave her. But you can t help seeing the justice of an assessment made by Aubrey s wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis), with whom Grant strikes up a mutually convenient friendship.
"What a jerk," she says, closing the door after their first meeting.
But nobody s perfect, and Polley s triumph is to have preserved, and enriched, the individuality that Munro breathes into her characters. The economy of the original story is both an advantage and a challenge.
Everything a filmmaker needs is right there on the page, but Munro s prose sets such a high standard of clarity and nuance that a filmmaker might be wiser to leave it alone. There are a few false notes in "Away From Her," scenes in which the dialogue has a tinny, theme-declaring sound. But overall, it is very fine, accurate in its insight and generous in its judgments.
There is, in Munro s mature work, a flinty wisdom about heterosexual love, a skepticism about romantic ideals that does not altogether deny their power or necessity. Polley, rather remarkably for someone still in her 20s, shows an intuitive grasp of this wisdom and a welcome, unsentimental interest in the puzzles and pleasures of a long, imperfect marriage.
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