Yesterday I finally redeemed a birthday gift and went to see the movie "Away From Her." What coaxed me out of the house...to be shocked by $5 for a small popcorn and $4 for a small soft drink?
(I asked a local theatre to change its policy and include such films 7 years ago, and it finally happened! They now call themselves "Regal Art/Foreign Film Theatre.")
"Away From Her" is a little, low-budget film that is both art and foreign (made in Canada), as well as the directing debut of Canadian actress Sarah Polley. Wow! She is so young to have such poise and awareness of subjects Americans sweep under the rug and never talk about. Alzheiber's, sexuality beyond the post-graduate level, and the meaning of love, to name a few.
Adapted from Alice Munro's short story: "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," the story develops as a drama about the intrusion of Alzheimer's on a couple's 45-year marriage and achieves uncommon power and an almost innate, instinctual compassion and intuition in describing love at its highest levels in this life.
Using a straightforward, restrained tone, this film avoids being melodramatic as it develops its themes about the nature of love, the role of sex in relationships, and how we learn to make peace with our guilty consciences--regardless of age or state of mind.
Do you remember Julie Christie from the 60s? Well, she is alive and well and as beautiful as you might expect her to be...without a face lift, too. She stars as wife, Fiona, whose casual forgetfulness coalesces into full-blown Alzheimer's at the young age of 62.
As Fiona's condition worsens, and at her urging, her husband reluctantly agrees to send her to a nursing home where she can receive better medical attention. This movie delves primarily into the caregiver/spouse's life changes that occur at the stage of life when, having reached a time when both can relax and enjoy each others' company, a spouse must reinvent and re-examine everything he had assumed previously about his marriage and love.
Because it is Christie playing Fiona, you quickly grasp a lot about Firona pre-Alzheimer's life. You also immediately understand Gordon Pinsent's portrayal of her husband, Grant, as remaining deeply in love with her as what she once was fades--very quickly. Pinsent's strength is that his character is never turned into an object of pity. His complexity is shared by every character in the film (including Olympia Dukakis and Wendy Crewson.) Wendy pulls off the tough role of nursing home administrator whose attempts to appear to care and nurture the patients only amplifies her officious nature. To me she was a very sad character because she was unhappy to be working in that capacity, possibly this was all her career would ever be. However, I loved Kristie, a caring, loving nurse who typifies all the wonderful nurses I have ever been helped by at times of illness or surgeries.
My favorite scene is at the end when Grant is sitting on a couch watching his wife totally enamored with another man, who is just as 'out of it' as she is, and a wannabe-Goth teenager with two-tone hair and facial piercings who flounces away from her family and sits beside him in a pout. Well, that alone is worth the price of the admission! I cannot imagine seeing it on television with all of its interruptions, etc....but maybe a DVD would suffice...if it never gets to your town.
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