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AWAY FROM HER
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For 44 years, Fiona (Julie Christie, Heat and Dust) has been married to Grant (Gordon Pinsent, The Shipping News), who has loved her even longer, and whose world changed irrevocably one afternoon when she turned to him and said, "wouldn't it be something if we were married?" Time has worked its way and Fiona is becoming senile, and despite all of Grant's protestations, a day comes when Fiona has decided she will move to the Meadowlake nursing home, whether Grant likes it or not. For she decides, he serves, a subservience that persists even as Fiona's mind is increasingly vacant. When she moves to the facility she tells Grant, I want to make love with you now and then I want you to leave, and he complies, only to find himself drifting, hypnotized, into a common-room sofa, where after a few minutes he receives a note from his wife:
Go now.
I love you.
Go now.
In that imperious repetition we hear the stern authorial voice of the screenwriter (Sarah Polley, The Sweet Hereafter) or short story's author (Alice Munro) ordering the protagonist about. As Away From Her shows, the tragedy of senile dementia falls equally if not more heavily upon the conscious spouse, the one who is always an anxious detective, scrutinizing the loved one's face, wondering, Are her lights on now? and parsing each short or cryptic phrase for meaning or idiocy. In this, Grant's total passivity is infuriating, the more so because there are acres of silence he could fill with practical questions, actions, entreaties, notes, procedures, caresses, reminders.
Meadowlake has a policy that new residents receive no visitors for thirty days, so they can settle in, and when Grant returns for his first visit, flowers in hand, Fiona does not know him. Instead she is doting on crabbed, slumped, angry mute Aubrey (Michael Murphy, Tanner). Thunderstruck, Grant staggers away. There follow several more equally awful encounters, Fiona baffled by his presence and hanging on Aubrey's every mewl and tremor. Grant is Orpheus trying to lead his wife out of the gloom of mental Hades, but his every action or inaction merely sends his Eurydice deeper into her own private good night, so he stands in the light, grieving and incapable of voicing it to the only one who could understand. With dazed hesitant desperation he seeks out Aubrey's wife Marian (Olympia Dukakis, Tales of the City), for conversation, for companionship, and eventually for the surrogates of love he can no longer receive from his wife, who has gone away from him.
There are movies that captivate during the cinematic experience and leave neither emotional resonance nor lasting memory. Away From Her is the opposite, slow in the event but potent afterwards. For most of its first hour the pace is glacial, and Fiona's deterioration is allowed to remain ambiguous because Grant volition is thwarted, his voice muted, by the static script, his insubstantial character, and his subservience to dictatorial wife and author.
For those who are long married, Away From Her is one of the saddest movies imaginable, its heartbreaking premise prevailing over its pedestrian dialog. It will not entertain you, nor make you happy, nor take away your cares, but I doubt you will forget it.