AWAY FROM HER (Sarah Polley, 2006)

I feel as though I’m disappearing. — Fiona
     Toronto-born Sarah Polley, who is in her twenties, is one of the current luminaries of Canadian cinema. She has acted in a number of highly regarded films, including Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997). Egoyan has produced Polley’s Away from Her, based on Alice Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” and reviewers have raised a chorus of praise of this maiden effort of hers as filmmaker. (Polley does not act in the film.) For me, though, The Sweet Hereafter was vastly overrated, and Polley’s film is stamped with the same detachment, emotional contortedness, and self-advertising restraint. Egoyan: apparently there is no getting away from him.
     The protagonist is Grant (Gordon Pinsent, hollow, crabbed, insipid), a retired teacher whose long-ago infidelity may be cropping up in the psyche of his wife of over forty years, Fiona. Fiona doesn’t say; behind the odd behaviors she exhibits in the group home she has voluntarily entered as Alzheimer’s Disease claims more and more of her brain, who can say what is going on. Grant’s guilty confusion—he wonders if Fiona is deliberately punishing him—gradually brings him to a point of considerable self-sacrifice to ensure Fiona’s mental ease and comfort.
     This is potentially rich stuff, and it is given depths of humanity by Julie Christie’s intelligent, poignant acting, which is accompanied by a convincing accent, or at least the startling erasure of her own accent. But Polley, who also wrote the script, isn’t searching or adventurous with the material. One constantly feels that her reticence masks timidity.
     Nor does Polley seem gifted with the eye of a visual artist. Egoyan’s shots often seem selfconscious, overly composed; but Polley’s are merely pointless, empty.
     The one-woman show isn’t Polley’s. It’s Christie’s.