Film is an all out winner

Away from her
Directed by: Sarah Polly
Starring:  Julie Christie, Michael Murphy, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis (110 mins)

THE Nietzchean maxim about the strong man forgetting what he cannot master is what this film brings to mind.
It is a deeply impressive and intelligent film about Alzheimer’s disease starring Julie Christie and directed by the Canadian actor-turned-director Sarah Polley, who at just 28-years-old, has shown remarkable maturity and flair with her adaptation of an Alice Munro short story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain.
Julie Christie gives a lovely performance – perhaps the best of her career – as a woman succumbing to early-onset dementia.
She equals and perhaps surpasses Judi Dench’s portrayal of the similarly afflicted Iris Murdoch.
Christie plays Fiona, married to a retired – academic called Grant (Gordon Pinsent), and they live in a house in the remote wilderness.
Here she is beginning to forget the names for simple things and put pots and pans away in the fridge: but a residual self-awareness means that the thick layers of snow settling on the landscape have become unbearable metaphors for the gradual obliteration of her memory.
Sick at heart, Grant prepares to put Fiona away in a retirement home, and thus far, the story could be the stuff of TV movies, such as the well-intentioned but sugary Do You Remember Love from 1985, starring Joanne Woodward.
But their story is more complicated than this. Fiona has painful memories of their marriage, particularly a period when Grant made free with beautiful young students.
Forgetting these lapses is another masculine prerogative of which the now grey-bearded Grant has availed himself, but for Fiona it has not been so easy.
So when Fiona appears to accept her condition, and even tells him, enigmatically, that there is something delicious in oblivion, Grant feels an obscure anger at her and at himself. Once in the home, moreover, Fiona forms an uxorious crush on a male patient: the silent Aubrey (Michael Murphy).
The nursing staff assure Grant these childlike switches of attention and loyalty are only to be expected, but Grant is deeply hurt.
As time passes, however, he realises that Fiona and Aubrey are in love; to preserve his wife’s happiness, he must protect the tragically damaged lovers, and this will mean a fraught complicity with Aubrey’s wife Marian (Olympia Dukakis).
Gordon Pinsent shows Grant retreating into a kind of gruff blankness; his face has the impassive, leonine-quality associated with Alzheimer’s sufferers, and he is in fact at one stage mistaken for a patient.
Grant wonders if has ever really known his wife, in all their decades together, and Alzheimer’s has made explicit to him the fear that his wife has always had a secret, secluded identity which will be forever unknown.
For Fiona, the awful truth is that perhaps Alzheimer’s has been a kind of liberation, not merely from memory but from the self: all those decades of habit and precedent which coerce us into accepted ways of behaving and feeling.
Polley sounds just one false note. Fiona watches a TV news report about Iraq and murmurs: How could they forget Vietnam?? The idea of Fiona emerging from her Alzheimer’s fog to voice this ironic-metaphor is not convincing. (They didn’t forget Vietnam: the conservative zealots who prosecuted the Iraq war remember it vividly as a just war incompetently managed.)
An outstanding film, though, a film for grown-ups and a promise of brilliant future work from Sarah Polley.

Review by Peter Bradshaw