Film

Away From Her (2006)

Director: Sarah Polley

Movie review

From Time Out Chicago

Experience told us to approach actor Sarah Polley’s directorial debut with caution: We’ve seen our share of overreaching vanity projects directed by superannuated child stars (would someone please take Emilio Estevez golfing?) and more than our share of drearily earnest Canuck dramas starring Pinsent, an actor who exemplifies the concept “world famous all over Canada.” Happily, experience was dead wrong: The film is a gem.

Skillfully adapted by Polley from a short story by the underappreciated Canadian writer Alice Munro, Away concerns a retired academic named Grant (an understated yet emotionally fluent Pinsent) whose beloved wife Fiona (Christie, still smokin’ hot at 66) is losing her mind, memory and self to Alzheimer’s. He reluctantly puts her into a care facility whose admission protocols require an initial 30-day separation between patients and their families. During that interim, Fiona transfers her affections from Grant to a mute, almost vegetative fellow patient named Aubrey (Murphy). Grant fears that Fiona’s emotional defection may on some level represent payback for his own past indiscretions with female undergraduates. Distraught, he turns to Aubrey’s wife (Dukakis) for help, but she has her own agenda that he must accommodate.

On paper this probably sounds like your garden-variety art-house bummer, but Polley has an uncannily deft feel for this grim material and infuses it with unsentimental wit and humanistic grace.

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