'Away From Her'

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

May 4, 2007

In Sarah Polley's beautiful directing and screenwriting debut, "Away From Her," Julie Christie plays a self-aware and piercingly articulate woman of a certain age named Fiona.

In an early scene, Fiona rises from a dinner table to pour wine for her husband and friends, when she is halted mid-action. She contemplates the bottle with confusion, trying and failing to locate in her mind the proper word for its contents. "I think I'm beginning to disappear," she announces to the gathering with an ambiguous smile.

And indeed she is. Fiona is suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and everyone at the table, herself included, gets that.

The poignancy of this shared awareness is coupled for the audience with a sense of art's little trade-offs. While Fiona's identity and memories begin to recede, Christie's substantial gifts emerge with a dimension and subtlety that surpasses anything she's done before.

Maybe it takes an actor to see the possibilities in a fellow actor. The 27-year-old Polley appeared opposite the Oscar-winning British star in "The Secret Life of Words," and has sculpted this rich adaptation of Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" with a knowing eye toward Christie's uniquely ethereal gravity.

Polley also has fashioned a revelatory vehicle for Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent, who brings a more earthbound weight to his quietly magnetic performance as Grant, a retired professor whose despair at his wife's deterioration is fraught with guilt from a long-past affair with a student. Grant and Fiona have lasted for decades by learning how to compartmentalize such lapses, but the incident springs back to haunt him as he installs his wife in an Alzheimer's clinic and absorbs the full impact of their first separation in 44 years.

Fiona embraces the hospitalization with a pragmatism and lack of sentimentality that unseats Grant, who is soon smacked with a double-punch: as his wife rapidly loses her connectedness to him, she redirects her nurturing and affection toward a frail fellow patient named Aubrey (Michael Murphy). Wracked by jealousy and insecurity, Grant turns to Aubrey's wife Marian (Olympia Dukakis, at her citrusy finest) for assistance.

Polley shapes the evolving bond between Grant and Marian as a series of flash-forwards, a structural choice that piles a little too much back-and-forthing onto a scenario that also summons ghosts from Grant and Fiona's past.

There is also a mannered undercurrent to the exchanges between Christie and Pinsent that requires a bit of getting used to. Fiona is given to willowy maunderings about mother nature; Christie smartly approaches them with firm, conversational readings that undercut the feyness.

Fiona's latent Virginia Woolf-ishess is contrasted with the sighing acerbity of Marian and the empathetic warmth of Kristy (the very good Kristen Thomson), a clinic nurse who befriends Grant. How invigorating it is to see portrayed such a range of complex, intelligent women, each of whom is surviving in an independent orbit rather than joined at the hip in some gooey movie idyll of sisterhood.