Away From Her is directed and scripted by actor Sarah Polley and based on a wonderful story called 'The Bear Came Over the Mountain' by her fellow Canadian Alice Munro, which appeared, as did Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, in the New Yorker in the late Nineties. It's about Fiona and Grant Anderson, an ageing couple in rural Ontario, married for 44 years and facing up to the wife's progressive Alzheimer's disease. Impeccably played by Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent, she's a former hospital auxiliary worker of Icelandic descent, he's a retired professor of Norse literature. A little older than Fiona, Grant feels that he's being punished, possibly by her, for his philanderings with students in the permissive Sixties. When she goes into Meadowlake, a geriatric home, she develops a deep, caring affection for Aubrey (Michael Murphy), a mute fellow inmate whom she may or may not have met briefly in her youth. (Older audiences will recall that Christie and Murphy's paths crossed in McCabe & Mrs Miller in 1971.)
Wisely or not, Polley has chosen to take the last third of Munro's lean, subtly suggestive story and tell it fragmented in parallel with the earlier part of the narrative. Thus, Fiona's entry into Meadowbrook and her developing association with Aubrey is interwoven with Grant's attempt to prevent Aubrey's somewhat bitter wife (Olympia Dukakis) from taking her husband away from the nursing home. This initially seems a trifle mysterious and arty, and may well have been influenced by Pinter's adaptation of The Go-Between, in which Michael Redgrave as the protagonist's older self visits the elderly Julie Christie. Anyway, this is a most adroit, confident film, calmly understated and never sentimental. It supports the argument that short stories and novellas are the best source material for feature movies.