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Review of "Away From Her"

As a student geriatric-chaplain, I once sat with a woman in the late stages of Alzheimer's. Her eyes were wide and vacant. Her mouth was open, and occasionally a low, airy moan would issue out of it, the soundscape of a wasteland. Despite myself, I took her condition as an insult to my youth.

When the visit was over, I retreated to my little office and immediately opened up the Web page of the Inter-net dating service I was using that summer. After the disheartening experience of watching a soul be con-sumed by the void, I needed at least the glimmer of the spark of an erotic connection.

This memory came to mind in response to "Away From Her" (2006), an understated Canadian film released internationally last year to general acclaim. An adapta-tion of Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," which appeared eight years ago in The New Yorker, Sarah Polley's movie portrays the story of Grant and Fiona, a loving couple in their late-sixties trying to cope with the deterioration of Fiona's mind. We observe them first at home together, in their snowbound chalet, presumably after the first signs of the disease have become apparent. A romantic dinner turns into subtle tragedy, as Fiona deposits a newly washed frying pan into the freezer and Grant lingers alone in the kitchen, hoping to spare his wife the sight of tears on his clenched face. For weeks he resists the inevitable, until Fiona, with grim nobility, convinces him that she is becoming unmanageable and must be placed in a care facility. "I want to make love," she says to him as they stand for the first time in her new room, "and then I want you to leave."

Her dismissal of Grant is a complicated act. On the one hand, it is an attempt to make a clean break, in accor-dance with the policy that new residents go the first month without visitors, so as to facilitate adjustment. (Critique of cold-hearted facility operations is an under-tone in the film.) But there may be hostility in it as well, the result of an old wound revealed elliptically on the drive over. Years before, when he was still a university professor, Grant was unfaithful with at least one young student. The unresolved betrayal lurks beneath the surface of their loving marriage, and it is precisely Fiona's illness, with the consequent eroding of her social veneer, that brings it up again.

This revelation drastically alters the tone of the story. What appeared at first to be a stark documentation of the impact of Alzheimer's on a long-term relationship acquires the additional valence of something between a mystery and a morality play. When Grant finally returns to visit Fiona, he discovers her altered, dotingly en-amored of Aubrey, a speechless, wheelchair-bound fellow patient around whom she concocts the fantasy of a fleeting teenage romance. Grant must wonder whether the sickness itself is responsible, or whether it is enabling Fiona to stage a drama of revenge. Her words are oracular. "He doesn't confuse me," she tells Grant, whom we are uncertain if she recognizes, of her new friend. Is this because she cannot accuse Aubrey of betrayal? Or could it be that in beholding Grant she feels all too painfully the life that is slipping through her fingers? Either way, Grant, shackled by his unresolved transgression, is denied the refuge of an honest grief.

The film raises important questions about love and obligation in the face of a wasting disease. When Aubrey is removed from the unit, Fiona falls into a depression. Grant finds her state, and the attendant prospect of a transfer to the "second floor," unbearable. He has told a nurse that he first fell in love with her because "she had the spark of life," and now he resolves that her mindless love of another is preferable to the loss of her soul to darkness. But in tracking down Aubrey to arrange a visit, he meets and begins a romance with Aubrey's wife, a pragmatic woman who longs for an attachment to lift her out of the tedium of caring for her invalid husband. She tells him, "you have to decide to be happy." Even as he seeks to perform what the movie phrases as a loving act of atonement, he finds comfort again in someone else's arms. But, given the circumstance, what else is he supposed to do?

Polley's film tells a softer version of Munro's story, com-plete with a slightly maudlin tagline ("It's never too late to become what you might have been"), which a com-passionate nurse informs Grant she has seen on a church billboard. In the original, Grant's delivery of Aubrey to his ailing wife seemed to have a more self-serving motivation, as if he were tying up a loose end to ensure his freedom. But both renditions end on the same note of uncertainty -- Fiona greeting her husband with a momentary clarity, finding the right word, perhaps for the last time, after a short search: "You could have just driven away. Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken."

The word hangs ambiguously over Grant's action. Has he achieved his redemption, erased the sin that held him back from open-hearted care, or has he compounded it? Can love for his vanishing wife co-exist with the need for a more sentient warmth? These are unanswered ques-tions, held open for the viewer's contemplation. I wonder, if I were Grant's chaplain, what I would say.

Reviewed by Benjamin M. Weiner, ICJS Seminary Intern

The Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies has pub-lished an Alzheimer's Study Guide, which is available for purchase. There is also a wiki, where you may go to add your own comments to the discussion of this terrible disease.

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