May 3rd, 2007

  The subject of aging, illness, and letting go are not mainstream subjects for commercial films, but Away From Her, marking the feature-film directing debut of popular Canadian actress Sarah Polley, is a devastatingly honest and understated new work that addresses all three issues with admirable maturity and a refreshing absence of sentimentality. Much of the praise must be reserved for the sublime Julie Christie, who has moved into middle age with subtle self-assurance and un-retouched natural beauty, as a woman disappearing inside the unforgiving prison of Alzheimer 's, and Gordon Pinsent as the anguished husband who watches her slip away. Fiona and Grant are people who have loved each other, hated each other, and learned to live with each other 's faults and virtues, establishing a 44-year marriage rooted in romance and solidarity. When all of that disintegrates like cigarette smoke, the husband is lost and hurt and confused about how they came to this defining detour in the road. It is to the everlasting credit of Ms. Polley that she draws the audience into their lives without being manipulative or sentimental. It just states facts and the actors get under your skin, welcoming you to the material without handing you a hankie. It is based on an Alice Munro short story called The Bear Came Over the Mountain, a terrific piece of writing so explicit and linear that too much tinkering and "opening up" for film would have ruined the delicacy of Munro's work. Most of the work was already done. Luckily for us all, Ms. Polley respected it enough to let it speak for itself. That trust pays off.

Away From Her is not only the story of a great romance fading or a beautiful woman disintegrating, but also the tragedy of a caregiver watching the foundation of his world eroding. Ms. Christie shows the spark in Fiona 's eyes slowly fading to gray. Wandering aimlessly from room to room, trying to remember what she 's looking for, putting away the saucepan in the freezer instead of the cupboard, she laughs off her slips. But as the gaps grow more frequent and her mind deteriorates, she fears saddling her husband with the burden of her declining health, overrrules Grant 's protests and makes the quiet decision to enter a rest home. While one strand of the narrative follows Fiona 's peaceful transition from strong, independent wife to docile, childlike patient, a second thread follows Grant 's tortured resignation to the trauma of separation after four decades together and determination to make as happy a homestretch for Fiona as possible. He feels guilty about all of the hurts, real and imagined, he might have caused in the past, and his own mental state is worsened by the cruel rules of Fiona 's new residence, which prohibit visits for a lengthy period of adjustment. One moving moment among many occurs after the first month-long orientation separation when Grant watches through a palm and sees Fiona 's attentions drift to another patient named Aubrey (Michael Murphy). Sitting devotedly at the side of her mute and wheelchair-bound new friend, Fiona sees Grant and doesn 't even seem to know him. Another occurs after Aubrey's release plunges Fiona into a pit of depression, when Grant bravely (but vainly) tries to persuade Aubrey 's own frank, no-nonsense wife (Olympia Dukakis) to return him to the institution. There is great potential for a cascading tearjerker here, but the impeccable actors and Ms. Polley 's smartly adapted script keep it tightly bottled. The emotional force remains, as well as the underlying turbulence in Alice Munro 's keenly calibrated writing, and Ms. Polley also has a keen ear and eyes for the little humiliations of Alzheimer clinics, their coldly detached administrators, and the glum ritual of family visitations. The luminous and vivid face of Julie Christie, losing focus as it gazes across vast distances, is both openly expressive and internally dark, her eyes registering the unknown landscape that is creeping up, taking over, and melting her life away. Never has the theme "Nothing lasts forever" been so truthfully wrenching. Dealing with the slippery slopes between memory and forgetting, guilt and freedom, Away From Her has even more to do with compassion, empathy, and enduring love. It's not a soap opera, but it's inescapably sad nevertheless--a heartbreakingly lovely and memorable cinematic experience.

Thank God, a few directors are still interested in exploring the heartbreaking journeys of ordinary people dealing with small issues that are universal. In The Land of Women offers no brutality, action, blood, sex, nudity, horror, or formulaic solution to box-office glory. But in his feature-film directing debut, writer-director Jonathan Kasdan chronicles the somewhat conventional encounters of an aspiring writer named Carter Webb (the excellent Adam Brody) with a variety of women who affect his life in unconventional ways. Remarkable in its subtlety, restraint, and maturity of vision, it sneaks up on you with stealthy fingers and steals your heart away.

Mr. Kasdan, the son of acclaimed director Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist), is a talent to watch. He cares about the pain of everyday life and deploys just the right amount of understated sensitivity to observe it without sentimentality. Carter is bright, curious, and perceptive enough to write the novel he 's been putting on hold, but the material trappings of Hollywood have distracted him while he fritters away his time writing soft-core porn and romancing a heartless, superficial actress. When she dumps him in a West Hollywood coffee shop to selfishly find her own "space," Carter sinks into a bottomless pit of depression and self-pity. Conflicted and lost, he packs up his emotional scars and flies to Michigan to visit his ailing grandmother and "find" himself. What he finds is that everything in life is sic transit. Even isolated from the neon delusion of show business, there is no escape from human interaction. Instead of a nurturing haven from reality, Grandma (Olympia Dukakis) is a bitter, neurotic old reprobate with Alzheimer 's who views everything around her with mean-spirited venom and foul-mouthed invectives. Instead of being alluring, the women in the family across the street are Sarah, a fading and underappreciated wife and mother (Meg Ryan) with an unfaithful husband, and her two problematic daughters. Cautiously warming to her new neighbor, who walks her dog and carries her groceries from the supermarket, Sarah learns to trust, sharing intimate secrets with Carter, and he opens up about his career anxieties and frustrations with the opposite sex. It is to Mr. Kasdan 's credit that neither the affair you know is coming nor the mushy love theme that accompanies it ever materialize. Thwarted in mid-plot after Sarah has a mastectomy, nothing more dramatic than a sweet kiss ever happens, but the writer-in-crisis grows up and learns some valuable lessons in life and death from the women he meets. Moral: If you get your heart shattered, be brave enough to pick up the shards and keep going, even if you find the road signs pointing in the opposite direction from where you started.

There are caveats. Adam Brody is too young and skinny and green behind the ears to be convincing as a writer of skanky XXX-rated sex films. Even without collagen, and a few forehead wrinkles instead of Max Factor, Meg Ryan is too beautiful and perky to be believable as a middle-aged woman with breast cancer. And in the Grandma role, Olympia Dukakis is damned close to unbearable. I guess she 's supposed to be endearing because she walks around wearing no underwear, gives everyone the finger, and says things like "Who gives a fuck?" All she does is make senility look irritating. Still, it is amazing to discover just how much this absorbing, intelligent picture has going for it: a strong sense of time and place, interesting characters, painfully sincere direction, and an intriguing scenario that pauses and breathes in all the right places. The elements of Hollywood soap opera hover, yet Mr. Kasdan never loses his grip, and the film will do nothing for the sale of Kleenex. I shudder to think how In the Land of Women would have turned out in the days of Ross Hunter and the Hollywood studio system.