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Away From Her
After 40 years of marriage, Fiona (Julie Christie) decides it is time to move on. This is no reflection on her husband, Grant (Gordon Pinsent), but an acknowledgment that her mind is already drifting out the door. As the Alzheimer's worsens she will require round-the-clock attention. Grant agrees in principle, but he's distraught when the nursing home bars him for the first 30 days, and then bereft to find that his wife has transferred her affections to another patient, Aubrey (Michael Murphy). Rereleased in light of Julie Christie's Oscar nomination for Best Actress, Sarah Polley's first film as director is a sensitive, careful adaptation of a short story by Alice Munro, 'The Bear Came Over the Mountain'. 26-year-old actress Polley (Dawn Of The Dead; The Sweet Hereafer) also wrote the script. She's reticent with the camera - not a bad thing in this case - but a little over-ambitious in opting for a needlessly arty structure which involves jumping forward confusingly to draw the story's third act into its first. Still, there's a lot she gets right too: the film is cool and meticulous, never sentimental. She keeps a tight grip on Jonathan Goldsmith's score, and bathes the movie in a cold, clear, wintery light. Most of all, she comes up trumps with the casting. Pinsent - you might recognize him from The Shipping News - is something of an icon back in his native Canada. Underplaying effectively, he seems almost as lost and bemused as Fiona. In his distress, he turns to Aubrey's wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis) with a strange request.
Christie is an icon everywhere. Where other screen beauties have either retreated from public view or kept their careers alive at the cost of their dignity, Christie's always maintained a fundamental ambivalence towards stardom; like Vanessa Redgrave, she's more interested in politics and life than fame or box-office, and you get the feeling there's very little in her filmography that she wouldn't stand by (including, presumably, two movies in which she costarred with Sarah Polley: Hal Hartley's No Such Thing and Isabel Coixet's The Secret Life Of Words). Moviegoers who fell in love with her back in the 60s in films like Darling, Dr Zhivago and Far From The Madding Crowd came to respect the intelligence with which she selected her relatively few roles in the 70s - they include such classics as The Go-Between, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Don't Look Now and Shampoo. Afterglow marked a comeback in 1997 - and another Oscar nomination - and since then she's cropped up in Troy and Finding Neverland, as well as Harry Potter (she was Madame Rosmerta in Prisoner Of Azkaban).
It's a distinguished list, and while there's no reason to fear she's going to call it a day in the near future, Away From Her certainly stands as one of her finest performances to date. Incidentally, it also means that she's been nominated for Best Actress in four different decades - a trivial statistic, perhaps, but a considerable achievement in a tough business. "I think all we can do in this situation is aspire to a little bit of grace," Fiona tells Grant as they come to terms with her dementia. As far as Julie Christie goes, grace has always been in abundance. Tom Charity 
More information about Away From Her » Critics' Reviews
Its only in cinema and North American cinema particularly that a sober and straight film about an ageing... read more on www.timeout.com Members' ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |
Dave Calhoun, Time Out