Away From Her
Directed by Sarah Polley
All movie stars are lucky. Some are special. Julie Christie has made so few movies—and the latest ones have not been star vehicles—that it’s possible to forget how special she is. In Away From Her, Christie brings extraordinary focus to portraying a 63-year-old woman realizing the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. When Christie’s Fiona—a stylish, intelligent, middle-class Canadian housewife—voluntarily leaves her husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) to retire in a convalescent home, Christie keeps the situation emotionally vivid. Away From Her expands from its tragic tearjerker basis to be a movie about the complexity of love and passion and sacrifice. Fiona and Gordon’s story is scaled for modest, realistic effect, but Christie makes it fascinating, almost mythic.
Because of Christie’s exotic beauty—her pale blue eyes, full bottom lip and sharp chin—she has always been a mysterious screen figure. That mystery works in Away From Her to embody the strange, alienating, misunderstanding of Alzheimer’s. The disease is not romanticized, but the havoc it wrecks on Fiona and Gordon’s marriage is expressed through the tragedy of their imperfect (realistically troubled) marriage. Fiona has abided her husband’s youthful indiscretions and now relaxes with his adoration. The subtext of their relationship also has mystery which is accounted for in the sexual allure that Christie makes apparent.
That face—legendary from Doctor Zhivago, Darling, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Shampoo and Afterglow—is also the mask of a fine actress. Christie’s emotional capacity and riveting screen presence makes a character’s behavior credible and idealized at once. This is a quality that Away From Her’s director, Sarah Polley (the young Canadian actress making her directorial debut), understands with special complicity. Polley makes Fiona’s first close-up a remarkable fusion of character and actress: Moviegoers have not had a chance to look this close and this long at Christie for many years. The image draws attention to the character and absorbs us in Christie who lends her now-aged beauty to the character.
It is a magnificent portrait, the sort that in the silent era—when people were accustomed to actually looking at movies—earned actresses like Garbo the “goddess” title. Polley uses Christie to make Away From Her contemplative. The things that time and memory take away are delicately expressed; she’s sometimes as young and lost as Ophelia or as mature and lyrical as Blanche DuBois; then bracingly, mundanely rational and astute. Christie helps the film (adapted from the Alice Munro short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”) transcend its literary conceit. Sexual mystery and marital mystery (“I think I’m about to disappear I think I’m about to disappear”) become a palpable subject.
Pinsent’s performance can’t be overlooked: Within his bearded face—cautious movements and yearning eyes—he achieves still, masculine bafflement better than Erland Josephson did in Ingmar Bergman’s marriage movies. The irony of watching his wife’s mental escape as she bonds with a stranger in the facility, while remembering his own infidelities, is wrenching. Gordon, a romantic who needs to love, is haunted by his wife’s ideal and her debilitation.
When Fiona asks how she looks, his answer, “Direct and vague, sweet and nice,” also summarizes his own mellow condition. Through Christie’s specialness, Away From Her combines the ache of loss with cinephilia. Fiona’s admiration of a rare flower—“Nature never fools around just being decorative”—becomes an inarguable fact.
