Beyond the Multiplex

Actress Sarah Polley talks about her moving directorial debut in this interview and podcast. Plus: Serial killers, skinheads and spaceships in China.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Independent Film, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex, Tribeca Film Festival

May 3, 2007 | What's really surprising about Sarah Polley's directing debut, "Away From Her," is not that a 28-year-old actress made a film about older people confronting Alzheimer's disease. It's true that not many young people, or old people either, want to think about this subject, but anybody who's seen Polley tackle wrenching topics in her acting roles certainly won't be shocked. She's played a woman dying of cancer ("My Life Without Me"), a survivor of Balkan-war atrocities ("The Secret Life of Words"), a woman who forges a friendship with a mythical Icelandic monster ("No Such Thing") and, oh yeah, a woman trapped in a shopping mall by flesh-eating zombies ("Dawn of the Dead").

No, what's startling about "Away From Her," which Polley adapted herself from Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Went Over the Mountain," is how clear and precise and composed it is. This isn't a neophyte's film; it's a film made by somebody with an innate understanding of cinematic language and a striking personal vision. As Polley said when I interviewed her in New York recently, every frame of the film is suffused with brilliant winter sunlight, and that cold light is illuminating unexpected corners of the 40-year marriage between Fiona (Julie Christie) and Grant (Gordon Pinsent). A wry, dry, elegant woman, proud and vain and intelligent, Fiona can feel her mind and her memory slipping away. She doesn't want to inflict her disease on Gordon, but her decision to move into a nursing home becomes an unexpected new beginning for both of them.

Inevitably, Christie is the focus of the film, both visually and thematically. She's nearly as beautiful as she was 40 years ago in "Doctor Zhivago" or "Far From the Madding Crowd," but the effect is totally different. Her hair has gone white and as Fiona she dresses largely in white clothing, sailing across the white snow and white light of Polley's Ontario backdrop like the carved figurehead of a great ship. At first, Fiona and Grant seem like a tender, affectionate couple, both still physically vigorous but facing the difficult closing chapter of a loving life together.

As anybody who knows Munro's work will suspect, the path of this narrative is twistier and thornier than that. All the unresolved issues below the surface of Fiona and Grant's marriage don't disappear just because Fiona is ill; if anything they resurface with a vengeance. Of course Fiona can't ultimately control the progress of her disease, but she's fully able to exploit the strange new opportunities it offers her. For all its gentle Canadian luminosity, "Away From Her" becomes much funnier, and much darker, than you expect. As Polley puts it, this film recognizes that people near the end of their lives are still adults, not angels or kindergartners; they're just as capable of betraying each other and keeping secrets, just as driven by sexual desire or jealousy, as the rest of us.

In person, Polley herself is a pretty, unaffected woman who looks younger than 28 and speaks (unlike most of her movie characters) with a pronounced Toronto accent. She could definitely still play sorority-girl roles if she cared to. She's friendly and laughs easily, but she also emanates drive and direction. Most movie directors ramble on and on in interviews, pursuing their own thoughts through lengthy discussions of influence and theory and technique. Polley's been reading lines for a living since she was 6 years old; she answers a question crisply and stops, waiting politely for you to ask the next one. Only when we began discussing the possible nursing homes of the future did I feel her go off-message and improvise a little. (Click here to listen to a podcast of the interview.)

Polley fully intends to keep acting as she pursues other directing projects; she'll appear in HBO's forthcoming miniseries "John Adams" and will star opposite Jared Leto in a new film from Belgian director Jaco van Dormael. Much as I'd hate to lose her intense, unsettling screen presence, "Away From Her" is something special. If it ever becomes a choice between Polley the actor and Polley the filmmaker, I'd tell the zombies to wait.

When this film premiered at Sundance, it got a lot of attention just for the subject matter, even before people had seen it. I guess we don't believe that a film about older people, about Alzheimer's disease, is going to be box-office magic.

Wouldn't it be interesting, though, if it was? If it outdid "Spider-Man" by like $100 million? It would be the upset of the year.

Is that your prediction?

That is definitely not my prediction.

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