Ray Pride

I am not one to resist the opportunity to rush headlong and heedless toward an apparent horizon of light and gush when I see a movie that cares for the mystery of love and longitude in shared human experience, but I have to say that alongside the Irish marvel of a musical, "Once," opening in a couple of weeks, the only release in 2007 to hover nearby would be 28-year-old Sarah Polley's debut as a writer-director, "Away From Her." (After twelve years as an actress, and six years since her thirty-eight-minute, dearly laconic comedy "I Shout Love" (2001), etched a dysfunctional, twentysomething Canadian relationship tethered to repetition, proximity and Hockey Night on CBC.)

"Away From Her," based on the Alice Munro short story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," opens with credits on white, something filmmakers are usually urged to avoid for a number of technical reasons. But that, succeeded by cross-country ski tracks across a white field, gently, yet emphatically, introduces the content of the story: all that fades; light, memory, life. Julie Christie plays Fiona, a woman who realizes that her memory is fading and that she will have to urge Grant, played by the iconic patriarch of Canadian cinema and television, Gordon Pinsent, to do the right thing, to recognize that the conflicts that will come as her Alzheimer's progresses must be addressed now. Of course, Fiona is in the person of 66-year-old Christie, her shoulder-length armor of curled tresses, this wildness of hair gone to silver and straw, and she is powerful, in scenes of strength and precognition, but later in those of loss and befuddlement and rage as well.

Polley's husband, David Wharnsby, edited the picture, and they traffic in a shattered temporal scheme of great acuity, understated yet blissfully right for a story about losing grip of memory. One is reminded of her co-producer Atom Egoyan's experiments in movies like "The Sweet Hereafter," in which she starred, but Polley and Wharnsby work with a deft, effortless touch, more like early Alain Resnais, in movies like "Last Year at Marienbad." Of course a movie about memory's synaptic reaches and catches ought to be shattered!

Yet the movie, with its maturity and grace, never announces itself as "art." Like most Canadian filmmakers, Polley is not afraid of profanity, and there is a great scene where a young woman, younger than Polley's own 28, observes Grant as he observes Fiona across the room, now obsessed with another patient at the nursing home. Even when she introduces a character that could be a stand-in for expectations of a young, female director, she does so with humor and lived-in gusto. There's a even a terrific, recurring hockey gag I won't give away, and you have to love a resident who admires Grant as a "charmer," and further reflects, "At this age, it's a real clusterfuck, all the charmers are taken. Or dead. Mostly dead." (When Fiona's disinhibition rises, she's given lines like "People want to be in love every day. What a liability!" And Polley hints deftly at Grant's past indiscretions by Fiona reflecting on his many female students, "All those sandals, all those bare female toes, Grant...")

The couple has been together for over four decades. Resentments have been tamped, if not banked. Fiona and Grant are characters who would read Alice Munro aloud to each other, as they do Auden's "Letters from Iceland" and Michael Ondaatje's heart-dashing "The Cinnamon Peeler": "When we swam once/ I touched you in the water/ and our bodies remained free/ you could hold me and be blind of smell/ You climbed the bank and said/ this is how you touch other women... / And you searched your arms/ for the missing perfume." Polley imports only a few of those lines, yet the film is as much an adaptation of those words as of Munro's. "Away From Her"--a title that quietly shakes the rafters when it is spoken aloud and illuminated in the picture--is also an actor's work, rich with reflective pauses, faces caught in consideration, simple in-between-ness.

Polley's been promoting the hell out of this movie, in hopes of many more to come, and early profiles, especially from Canada, have made easy pop-psych from cribbing her life story, which includes childhood scoliosis and as a result, steel rods in her back for life. (Julie Christie, I will grant, has said that Polley is much more mature than she and that she loves the insistent metaphor of Polley's spine alongside her gentle demeanor to reflect her gifts as a director.) This is the sort of movie that can smash the heart to bits and 116 minutes later, piece it back together, filling the room with more oxygen than you can stand. There are moments of fathomless lucidity and grace.

Every film upon the face of creation could end profitably with one of two images: the flat horizon beyond the sea or the turn of a woman's face toward or away from the camera (as in the end of Godard's "A bout de soufflé" or in paintings by Gerhard Richter), turning her neck to evade or engage a gaze. Polley understands both. Her potential is great and "Away From Her" is just so measured, so tender, so kind, so very, very good.

"Away From Her" opens Friday.

(2007-05-08)

Also by Ray Pride

One Dish
The side of mashed potatoes, with supposed "Cajun" gravy satisfies, a big schoop pressed into the top, filled with a drib of gravy, a quick whiff of green pepper when you peel the plastic lid off the Styrofoam container, a hint of indeterminate meat in the mix
(2007-05-07)

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Rushing on a sunny Thursday noon across Lake Street to a destination five blocks and ten, twelve minutes away, I want to grab something to eat during the movie screening to come; the first stop's a White Hen, where the prices are high, the readymade sandwiches are gone and a few dozen cases of beer re-stacked high block the drinks aisle
(2007-05-07)

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The latest entry is a flurry of action and character set pieces, not as fully realized as the post-adolescent furies in "Spider-Man 2," but with a dogged determination to give you your two-hours-and-twenty-minutes worth, with a riot of tones, including interludes reminiscent of "Saturday Night Fever" and the Three Stooges, along with the barrage of restless action and a surfeit of weeping characters--everyone seems to cry copiously at least twice
(2007-05-01)

Tip of the Week
Andrea Arnold's beautifully crafted first feature, "Red Road," following three shorts, including the Oscar-winning "Wasp" (2003), was shot on digital video and exploits a fresh, bold palette in her story of Jackie, an alienated Glasgow policewoman (Kate Dickie) whose job is to watch Glasgow's banks of surveillance monitors
(2007-05-01)

Love, Truly Love
(2007-04-27)

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(2007-04-24)

Tip of the Week
(2007-04-24)

Bow Wow Wow
(2007-04-17)

Tip of the Week
(2007-04-17)

When Trash Fails
(2007-04-10)

Tip of the Week
(2007-04-10)

The Other Side of the Mountain
(2007-04-03)

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