Away from Her
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Movie Reviews of Away from Her
Movie Review: The heartbreak of Alzheimer's
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a heart tugging story that will bring tears to your eyes. Beautiful Julie Christie is the Alzheimer's victim, and her husband watches her deteriorate. Just as sadly, she watches herself deteriorate.
As she does, she insists on checking in to an Alzheimer's facility, leaving her husband, who is asking her to stay with him.
The turning point of the movie is the first month in the facility. They have a rule that there is to be no contact between patients and family for the first month of residence. When that month is over and the husband visits his beloved wife, she is already in love with another man and pays scant attention to her husband, who she either doesn't recognize as her husband, or wishes to revenge herself on for his infidelities to her during their marriage. Her motive is never explained. It appears that she's innocent of a vengeful motive, sweet as she is, but her extreme deterioration in that one month doesn't seem right.
I understood it to be that she is far more comfortable as the support giver for the other man than as the pathetic wife losing her mind. With this other poor man, she comforts him, takes care of him, mothers him, gives him affection that he is desperate for. She can have a positive self image and not feel so low. She can be useful. She can be a whole woman to this man, his mom, his beloved.
There even seems to be some question as to whether Julie has sex with this man. Probably not, I suppose, but that is left in the air. There is a sudden departure. The two of them are separated. He is pulled out of the facility. Later we hear that his wife couldn't afford to leave him there. That same wife is anxious to start an affair with Julie Christie's husband, and they consummate it.
Julie Christie's husband finds himself in the position of wanting to bring his rival back to be with his beloved wife, just to stem the tide of her apathy and deterioration. He drives the other man back to visit his beloved wife. Then the movie gets one final zinger in. Julie recognizes her husband, for the first time in ages, and hugs him. We realize that it is not going to last. She'll forget him soon enough. With the two of them hugging, it's hard not to cry.
Movie Review: The Incomparable Julie Christie Moves Us Again
Summary: 5 Stars
Based on a short story by Alice Munro, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," AWAY FROM HER, directed by Sarah Polley, will break your heart. Fiona, in her early 60's develops Alzheimer's and makes the decision, when the time comes, that she will enter a nursing home. The plot is straight forward and all too familiar to those of us who have dealt with this insidious, unforgiving disease. When Fiona enters the nursing facility, she becomes more distant to her husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and develops a crush on another patient Aubrey, who is married to Marian (Olympia Dukasis). Fiona becomes every person with Alzheimer's: the putting of the skillet in the refrigerator, the covering up of memory loss, ("I'm not adept at names") remembering things in the distant past, (on the way to the nursing home, Fiona reminds Granta of his affairs with women students twenty years previously) the remembering of things one minute and forgetting them the next, the gradual deteriorating of both mind and body.
Both Pinsent and Dukasis give fine performances. (She as Marian has her own problems which are mostly financial. She cannot leave Aubrey in the home or she will lose their house, their only asset.) But Christie is magnificent as Fiona-- and looks the way a woman who was otherworldly beautiful at 20 would look at 66, still beautiful in old age. Much of the action is set in snowy Canadian winters and there are shots of Christie that remind us of Laura in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO.
For all its bleakness-- and there is plenty of that, particularly the scenes in the nursing home where some patients just sit, others shout, and the female staff with their forced cheerfulness, many of whom wear those awful flowered tops and ugly pastel pants-- the movie is also about the power of love and staying together for the duration. There is a beautiful passage when Fiona reminds Grant that he had nothing to hold him to her in the marriage, that he could have left but he didn't. She loves him for that and thanks him.
We should thank our neighbors to the north for this thoughtful film.
Movie Review: To Demand Less and Live More
Summary: 5 Stars
A tenderness that breaks the heart with all that it contains: in this sweet tragedy of a 45-year married couple learning yet their greatest lessons in love as the wife Fiona (Julie Christie) deteriorates into Alzheimer's disease and her husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) watches helplessly her gradual withdrawal into a world where he cannot follow. Here are the great wisdoms. As he takes her to the nursing home, she has a lucid moment of remembering, and while we have until that moment watched only the most ideal moments of marriage - the love making, the leaning on the shoulder in camaraderie, the sweet whispered nothings, the reading of bedtime stories - now surfaces a deeper nuance. She speaks of a fling of some 20 years ago, a pained look crossing his face at her recalling, but she is calm and she is peace, saying only that people are too demanding, and that too many of us demand to be in love every day. That he did well by her. That she wishes to thank him. What four decades plus teach a couple is that there are many kinds of days, and to have a life of love, one must accept the less loving days alongside the glorious ones.
Perhaps it has taken him to this moment of parting to fully understand what she understood 20 years ago. Institutionalized, she disappears into a fog. It seems the only figure emerging from the fog is that of Aubrey, a man in a wheelchair who never speaks, but forms a bond with her that excludes both his wife and her husband. The real husband can only watch, heartbroken, as the love of his life no longer recognizes him, but clings to another. We watch his heart shatter, yet his loyalty never waivers. Not even when comfort is found in the strangest places.
"Away From Her" has all the elements of a grand love story: passion, betrayal, loyalty, forgiveness, acceptance, transitions, letting go, finding home again. The two main performances, Christie and Pinsent, are exemplary.
Movie Review: Remarkable debut for director Polley, with help from two superb leads
Summary: 5 Stars
The cruel progression of Alzheimer's disease is a topic that has been treated before in film (notably in the biopic "Iris," starring Judi Dench), but arguably never with as much delicacy and sensitivity as in "Away from Her," a first directorial effort from Canadian actor Sarah Polley ("The Sweet Hereafter"). The success of this chronicle of a long-lived marriage threatened by the descent into dementia of the wife is not only due to the literate script, but to a pair of remarkable performances: that of the ageless Julie Christie as Fiona, the wife, and of Gordon Pinsent as her husband Grant. Christie conveys Fiona's calm self-awareness in the face of her early symptoms with grace and touches of gallows humor ("I seem to be disappearing," she remarks at one point). Later, her increasing withdrawal from reality after her husband is compelled to institutionalize her is painful to watch. Pinsent, whose long career has been mainly as a journeyman character actor, is perhaps less immediately striking but no less compelling as the husband. Grant is forced to witness, first, his beautiful, elegant wife's gradual loss of her grip on reality; second, her strange attachment to a fellow patient, Aubrey, in the care center where they both are placed. In a kind of jealous despair he embarks on a relationship with Aubrey's embittered wife (the reliable Olympia Dukakis). "Away from Her" catches to perfection the waste and indignity not only of the disease itself, but the milieu into which its sufferers are forced. Ultimately, though, the film is not about Alzheimer's; it is about the love between two people that endures their human flaws, and that binds them as they face an unimagined and unimaginable end to their journey together. Despite occasional rough edges that betray a limited budget, this is altogether a remarkable filmmaking debut.Movie Review: uplifting and hopeful
Summary: 5 Stars
given the subject matter,you might think this film would be
depressing,but i didn't find it so.it's about a husband and wife who
have been married a long time,when they both notice the wife has been
having memory lapses.soon they come to the realization that she has
Alzheimer's disease.the rest of the movie deals with their struggle to
cope.the meaning of the title is explained very early on,and makes a
lot of sense.the acting is superb.that's the one word that comes to
mind.Julie Christie is the wife,Fiona,and is brilliant in her
transformation from loving wife to someone in the advanced stages of
Alzheimer's.the transformation is subtle,as is her performance.Gordon
Pinsent is equally great as Grant,her husband.Olympia Dukakis is also
strong.beyond the performances,the movie itself is very realistic in
how it depicts the people afflicted with Alzheimer's,as well as their
loved ones.it's also very moving,and is uplifting and even hopeful.i
hope Sarah Polley continues to direct,as she has a very great future
ahead of her.for me,Away From Her is a 5/5