"Going But Not Gone"--Away From Her (2007 DVD)

      I had heard good things about the movie "Away From Her," (written and directed by Sarah Polley and based on a story by Alice Munro) but I still approached it with a lot of trepidation. Although there is no history of Alzheimer's in my family, I've always held a particular and perhaps irrational fear of that disease, of how it can steal a loved one from you--or you from yourself--not quickly, but piece by piece, one memory at a time. How would I react to watching my quick-witted and proudly independent wife forget how to make herself a pot of tea? How would I feel the first time she didn't know who I was? Why do I want to watch a movie that will make me dwell on these questions? But I'm glad I did, because "Away From Her" probes Alzheimer's effect on a forty year-old marriage--a loving marriage, but by no means perfect--with graceful restraint and a minimum of fuss, thanks in large part to fine work from its leads, Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent.
      As the film opens, loving senior couple Grant (Pinsent), a retired college professor, and Fiona (Christie) seem to be living an idyllic life in their country cottage in the snowy woods, reading to each other at night and skiing through the beautiful scenery by day. But Fiona has begun to act erratically--she absent-mindedly sticks a frying pan in the freezer, she suddenly can't remember the word for "wine,"--and when one day she becomes disoriented and lost on one of her routine cross-country ski outings, Fiona herself decides that she should be in an assisted living home. In order to allow incoming residents to become comfortable in their new surroundings, the home has a strict 30-day no visitors policy. When Grant makes his first visit a month later, Fiona has formed a disturbingly close relationship with another resident, the silent Aubrey (Michael Murphy), and seems entirely indifferent to Grant's presence.
      And here the real drama of the movie begins, as Grant struggles both with Fiona's progressing disease and the nagging notion that at least part of her attachment to Aubrey may be deliberate punishment for Grant's transgressions earlier in their marriage. Grant seeks solace and advice from a sympathetic but practical nurse (Kristen Thomas). Nurse Kristy has seen far too much of sickness and loss to offer Grant any hollow platitudes or false hope; their honesty with each other affords Grant little opportunity for self-pity. Eventually Grant's attempts to reconnect with Fiona, or, failing that, to find a way to make her happy, lead him to seek out Aubrey's wife Marian (Olympia Dukakis), an even more unflinching pragmatist than Nurse Kristy. Huddled together in the same emotional foxhole, she and Grant form an uneasy alliance of survivors.
      Christie has been nominated for an Academy Award for her work in "Away From Her," an honor her performance certainly merits. She conveys Fiona's fierce independence while simultaneously making it clear that Fiona has embraced her illness as a tabula rasa, the perfect means of wiping clean the most painful memories from the slate of her marriage. In the scene where Grant first drives Fiona to the home, she tells him, out of the blue, that though her mind is failing, she hasn't yet forgotten the pain of his affairs with young coeds in his teaching days. "I'm going," she reminds him, "but I'm not gone."
      The idea that she might now want to "be gone" is an uncomfortable one both for Grant and the viewer. The current wisdom of Western medicine says that we must fight diseases like Alzheimer's, bombard them with medicines or poisons or radiation, and that we must keep up this fight to the bitter end, no matter how hopeless the outcome or how high the physical or emotional cost. Grant's decision on how best to help Fiona (which I won't reveal here), poignant in its selflessness, proves that such a philosophy is not always the best way to go.
      Incidentally, "Away From Her" contains one of the most perfectly-timed and devastatingly darkly-comic moments I've ever seen in a movie. I won't give it away, but it involves Grant and one of the home's residents, a former football play-by-play announcer who narrates everything he sees like he's still calling a game. As the moment unfolds you want to cry, and then have to laugh hysterically, and then you want to cry again. Beautiful.

Next up on the Oscar trail..."Atonement"