Away from Her

Posted 15 September 2007 in screencaps Screening log

Rating

2007 - Canada

Director
Sarah Polley

Starring
Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis

It started about 20 minutes into the film and only for a few brief moments did I stop sobbing until well after the credits rolled. Not all of this can be explained as Polley’s masterful adaptation or direction: a film about Alzheimer’s is likely to be disturbing and heartbreaking even under the worst of circumstances. It is to Polley’s credit that she kept things simple: allowed the condition and her subject’s deterioration to speak for themselves and her excellent cast to explore the emotional terrain freely. Only the aspect of sacrifice as it manifests itself in the last half hour struck me as fairly awkward and poorly reasoned in an otherwise authentic, natural inexorable march into the certain future. The problem seems to arise when writer and adapter feel a need to impose a conventional plot upon a condition which has no reason, no logical progression, no rules or order. It would be better served with less structure propping it up, as the film was more successful in achieving in the first hour or so. Simply: this is how it is; this is how we cope.

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Lauren, 25, out-of-work librarian. At the moment, TLC is but a review blog and catalogue of my film-related perversions. I always plan to do more with it — and to one day step outside 30s Hollywood again. Who knows?


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