Away from Her
by Sarah Polley
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DVD details
Actor: Gordon Pinsent, Julie Christie, Michael Murphy, Olympia Dukakis, Wendy CrewsonDirector: Sarah Polley
Brand: LIONS GATE HOME ENT.
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0; French (Subtitled)
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 110 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-09-11
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Lions Gate
DVD Reviews of Away from Her
DVD Review: One Of My Favorites!
Summary: 5 Stars
I just couldn't take my eyes of the television screen while watching this movie! It was ever so touching and will always be one of my all time favorite movies.DVD Review: Can love endure when memory fails? Can joy be found in the midst of sorrow?
Summary: 5 Stars
The film opens with a closeup of a small piece of paper, held in an old hand...the camera pans up, and we see that the old hand belongs to the old face of an old man, Grant (Gordon Pinsent) who is driving in a wintry landscape. Soon the scene cuts to Fiona (Julie Christie) skiing across a similar snowy background, and somewhere within these first two scenes, the first minute or so of film, I was sure that this film was going to be great.
Fiona and Grant have been married for 44 years; it seems to be a happy marriage though there are signs right from the opening of the film that a serious problem has arisen: Fiona is starting to lose her memory. Alzheimers is suspected, but unspoken in the first several scenes. We see Fiona and Grant skiing, cooking, talking together; we see them with another couple; we see the lines of tragedy beginning to show on Grant's face much more starkly than on Fiona's. She is frustrated, but somehow less frustrated than Grant, who seems desperate.
We learn that Grant has looked into an expensive but nonetheless artificial nursing home, Meadowlake; soon the narrative starts to fracture a little...we see later scenes, as Grant is conversing with a woman whose husband seems to figure into Fiona's story, and we get flashbacks of the recent past and the far past, images of the couple when young and beautiful. Problems in the marriage are now visible; Grant had apparently cheated on Fiona when a young professor...now Fiona is in the nursing home, and doesn't seem to know Grant, but has become very friendly with another patient, Aubrey, whose wife Marian (Olympia Dukakis) it is that Grant is talking with, eventually pleading with, in her home at a later point in time. Grant wants Marian's husband to return to Meadowlake, despite the relationship that was developing with Fiona; why he wants to do this is one of the many deep, not entirely fathomable decisions we see made by these damaged people, as their lives are changing and perhaps ending.
I don't want to divulge more here; not that any of the revelations or developments are shocking, or even surprising, but because they are not - because they have a reality to them that is all too rare in family dramas like this one. There are no easy answers here, there is no promise of a happy ending nor is there the release of tragedy - at least, not in any obvious theatrical way. The performances are uniformly terrific; Julie Christie (Fiona) is rightfully getting a lot of praise for the way she can simultaneously show vivacity and joy, and the sorrow at losing herself - but to me Gordon Pinsent's performance as Grant is if anything even more memorable, he is the sorrowful center, he understands how his world is crumbling even when Fiona does not, and in his enormously expressive face are all the years of joy, discovery, guilt and anguish.
Sarah Polley's direction at first seems a bit mannered, a bit Euro-artsy, with several static shots of Fiona and Grant talking, reading, looking at each other, and quite a few cutaway establishing shots that don't at first have obvious meaning, but as the story takes on a sad inevitability the feel of the film becomes warmer and more open. It's an amazingly assured and mature debut and probably the very best compliment I can make is that I find it difficult to compare it to anything. Bits and pieces: something of the tone of her mentor (and exec producer) Atom Egoyan's THE SWEET HEREAFTER; something like the way that John Cassavetes could draw richness out of characters that we were seeing late in life and whose backgrounds we don't really know; something of the respect for and sorrow at the problems of aging in Yasujiro Ozu. Mighty praise. Entirely deserved, for one of the very greatest of Canadian films.
DVD Review: might bring you to tears
Summary: 4 Stars
I pretty much knew what to expect going into Away From Her. A man has to make the tough choice to take his wife to a retirement home that helps those experiencing Alzheimer's disease.
What happens at the place is the focus of the storyline. His wife becomes close friends with another man at the retirement home, but the great thing about the husband is that he's honest, loving and caring which means he visits his wife all the time regardless of the fact she seems to have fallen for another man.
The storyline development moves along at an extremely slow pace, but of course, it's only appropriate to move along the pace as such a slow speed given what the story is about.
The movie doesn't focus on Alzheimer's as much as one would expect. The film is more about the story that develops dealing with the mans wife and her new male friend taking care of each other, and how the man has to deal with his wife in the condition that she's in.
I liked the movie. It couldn't have been any better if you ask me. It told a nice story, was a little bit sad, will probably make you think, and it's a movie worth watching
DVD Review: Away From Her.
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the most moving movies I have seen. Julie Christie is magnificant. Sarah Polley's handling ov the material is magical. I also recommend reading the original short story by Alice Munro called "The Bear Went Over The Mountain."DVD Review: Excellant !
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought this movie gave a accurate view of the potential of this disease. It was difficult to watch, as my father has the tragic disease. It also told a beautiful love story.
Description of Away from Her
Married for almost 50 years, Grant's (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona's (Julie Christie) commitment to each other appears unwavering. Their daily life is filled with tenderness and humor; yet this serenity is broken by Fiona's increasingly evident memory loss - and her restrained references to a past betrayal. For a while, the couple is able to casually dismiss these unwelcome changes. But when neither Fiona nor her husband can deny any longer that she is being consumed by Alzheimer's disease, the couple is forced to wrenchingly redefine the limits of their love and loyalty - and face the complex, inevitable transition from lovers to strangers."I'm going," says a lovely, understated Julie Christie, in a heart-wrenching moment of recognition that Alzheimer's is slowly descending on her. "But I'm not gone." Away from Her, the directorial debut of young Canadian actress Sarah Polley, allows two themes--the growth of love, and the limits of the mind--to intertwine, uplift, fall, and rise again, throughout its arc. What should be relentlessly depressing is instead a film of great courage, humor, defiance--and a quality that Christie's character, Fiona, calls out in another defining moment: grace.
Away from Her chronicles a love story between Fiona and her longtime husband, Grant, played with bearlike stolidity by Gordon Pinsett, as the couple struggle with the onset and acceleration of Fiona's Alzheimer's disease. Moments of lucidity and wry observation pepper Fiona's decline, and Christie gives an unforgettable performance as a woman who is both ordinary and singular to those whom she's touched. The story is set against a frigid Canadian winter, with fields of snow as a background underscoring the bleakness of Fiona's diagnosis; yet life is constant and surprising, in the call of a meadowlark or the resurrected memory of a skunk lily. A scene of Fiona out for her daily cross-country ski shows Christie's gorgeous, sensual face in closeup against the snow, framed by a babushka, reminding the viewer of a similar scene of the decades-younger Christie in Dr. Zhivago. It's impossible not to be touched by the gifts of this extraordinary actress, through the life of this everywoman, whose very presence is shot through with grace. --A.T Hurley
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