Story

Synopsis

Away From Her is the lyrical screenplay adaptation of celebrated author Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”.

Away From Her is a beautifully moving love story that deals with memory and the circuitous, unnamable paths of a long marriage. Married for 50 years, Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona’s (Julie Christie) commitment to each other appears unwavering, and their everyday life is full of tenderness and humour. This serenity is broken only by the occasional, carefully restrained reference to the past, giving a sense that this marriage may not always have been such a fairy tale. This tendency of Fiona’s to make such references, along with her increasingly evident memory loss, creates a tension that is usually brushed off casually by both of them. As the lapses become more obvious and dramatic, it is no longer possible for either of them to ignore the fact that Fiona is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Eventually, Fiona decides that it is time for her to enter into Meadowlake, a retirement home that specializes in the disease. One of the more archaic rules of Meadowlake is that a patient may not have any visitors during their first month in the facility in order to “adjust.” After an excruciatingly painful 30 days separated from his wife, Grant returns to Meadowlake to discover Fiona seems to have no memory of him and has turned all of her affection to Aubrey (Michael Murphy), another resident in the home.

Grant, finding no option but to accept his new status as an attentive acquaintance visits her daily and is forced to bear witness to the cement bond that has developed between her and Aubrey. Over time, he befriends Kristy (Kristen Thomson), a salt of the earth nurse who works at Meadowlake. Touched by his dogged devotion, she takes a special interest in him. Through their conversations, Grant’s imperfect history and the perverse poetic justice of this agonizing situation with Fiona and Aubrey becomes evident.

When Aubrey’s wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis) returns from her vacation, she suddenly takes Aubrey out of Meadowlake. Fiona is devastated by the separation and enters into a deep depression. Her condition deteriorates rapidly. Grant, fearful for Fiona’s life, embarks on the greatest act of self-sacrifice of his life as a means to attaining his wife’s final happiness.

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Production Notes

“The leaves of memory seemed to make a mournful rustling in the dark.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sarah Polley was on a flight back from working on Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing in Iceland when she read Alice Munro’s short story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” in the New Yorker. “I was so unbelievably moved by the story. I had just finished working with Julie Christie, and as I read, I kept seeing Julie’s face in the character of Fiona,” said Polley. “I am certainly not one of those people who reflexively thinks about adapting stories; I just want to leave the things I love alone. But this fascinated me. I read the story and I saw the film and I knew what the film was.”

At that point in Polley’s career, she had been acting since age six, and had written and directed two short films, Don’t Think Twice and The Best Day of My Life. “For two years I couldn’t get the story out of my head and finally asked Producer Danny Iron to look into getting the rights. I threw myself into writing, but it’s daunting, taking on the work of someone you respect so much. Alice Munro is one of my favourite writers because she looks right through things. The characters are all so flawed, so lovable in certain moments and so detestable in others. The adaptation didn’t feel like a huge process because the film was embedded in that story.”

Working along side of Polley were producers, Jennifer Weiss, with whom she made her Genie-award winning short, I Shout Love, and Simone Urdl, partners in the production company The Film Farm, and Daniel Iron of Foundry Films who produced Polley’s first short Don’t Think Twice. Atom Egoyan served as Executive Producer. Daniel Iron, having known Polley for a very long time, never doubted her ability to direct a feature. “I know how fiercely intelligent and diligent she is. She’s been on sets since she was young and knows the craft better than any first time director. She shot-listed her first draft of the script.”

Egoyan endorsed this assessment. “I was aware, on The Sweet Hereafter, that Sarah was watching everything very closely. So it’s a natural progression. She has alarming maturity that comes through in the script. There is an austerity, clarity, and a dramatic through-line. It’s respectful of the source material and yet quite confidently able to expand on it as well. It does what cinema is able to do remarkably well, which is to take us, just through the human face, to places we don’t expect to travel.”

“Sarah was definitely ready to make a feature,” said Jennifer Weiss. “If you watch her earlier films, you see she fits the Alice Munro style – there’s a subtlety and a simplicity and Sarah knows how to work with actors to bring out the nuance in the same way that Alice Munro works with character.” While Munro was not involved in the adaptation, she was pleased with the result. Polley found this out in a flattering voicemail message from Munro left on December 23, 2005.

Away From Her is a love story about devotion, daring not only because Polley is 27 years old, but also because she is in the first few years of her own marriage, looking forward at two people married for 50 years. “This love story moves you,” noted Weiss, “You look at it from your own perspective and bring to it your own experiences. It confirms that life is cyclical and we all go through the challenges of love and marriage and commitment.”

Disrupting the tranquility between the Anderssons is Fiona’s failing memory. In spite of Grant’s need to deny it, she is ill. Alzheimer’s Disease. At first barely noticeable, memory-by-memory, it wipes away a lifetime. What fades first is the recent past, which for the Anderssons has been a good time in their lives. Without the protective coating of their negotiated peace, their past comes to the fore and with it, emotions they both prefer would remain forgotten.

“The role of Alzheimer’s in the film is a metaphor for how memory plays out in a long relationship: what we chose to remember, what we choose to forget. It’s quite mature for Sarah because she has not gone along that path yet,” said Producer Simone Urdl. Memory, wrote Oscar Wilde, in “The Importance of Being Earnest”, is the diary that we all carry about with us. Unlike a documentary, a diary is personalized by joy and pain. Memory is selective.

Indeed, Polley wanted to explore how a long marriage survives without falling back on remembrances of a more romantic past, a gambit on which many films rely. She states, “Love stories about older people tend to be either extremely sentimentalized or justified by a million flashbacks to when they were young, which I think is a lot less interesting.” New love is a chemical ride of hormones, fraught with the meshing of lives, but invariably, new lovers arrive in each other’s arms with a clean slate. If there is baggage, it is from previous relationships. Give the new couple half a century of being accountable to each other, and that’s when Polley becomes interested because they have their own emotional scar tissue which, being the strongest part, is remembered the longest. What Grant did to Fiona may have been the folly of his youth, but he was mistaken if he thought time would wash it away. “I wanted to make this relationship a real one that’s been through incredible things and come out the other side. It’s made up of all that experience and emotion and transgression.”

The appeal of Away From Her lies in the casting as much as the story. Oscar-winning actresses Julie Christie and Olympia Dukakis are joined by Gordon Pinsent and Michael Murphy, both award-winning actors in their own right. “Having these actors who we are all familiar with is crucial to the story because we have to feel connected with them from the beginning,” said Weiss.

The graying of the baby boomers has reinterpreted the significance of each decade and Christie, Pinsent, Dukakis and Murphy embody the new definition of age to include vitality and vibrancy. Said Murphy, veteran of such films as Annie Hall, Manhattan, M.A.S.H. and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. “I had this conversation with Candice Bergen: when you are younger, you’d walk into a room and there was sexuality in the air. Now, it’s like someone flipped the switch and suddenly they’re looking at me like I’m somebody’s aunt. You get to a certain age and you think all that stuff is gone and it’s not. I don’t feel any different than I did when I was 30. There’s a part of us that doesn’t belong to time. It’s a spirit thing.”

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Casting

Away From Her centres on Fiona Andersson. In her youth, she was ‘ethereal, light and sly’, and time has not diminished her allure. Part of her charm is her vulnerability which becomes more pronounced as her memory begins to falter.

Julie Christie was the first, and only, person to ever be Fiona Andersson. “Julie is captivating, magnetic and stunningly beautiful,” recalls Polley, thinking back to what made her see Christie in that role. “She has the sharpest mind and this piercing gaze into other people. She’s full of life and wonder and curiosity, and it’s impossible not to fall in love with her. But you are always chasing her because she’s with you one second and not the next and that was exactly my experience with the character of Fiona in the short story. All you have to do is see her in anything from Darling to Afterglow to know she’s a brilliant actor, but I wanted to see her in a role that was more complex. I really had a fascination with her and that’s ideal when making the film. You want to be fascinated with the person in front of the lens.”

“Fiona has to be vibrant and with it, and then you have to see her deterioration. Julie has the ability to do that without appearing forced. She is so present and yet there is something ephemeral about her and Sarah knew she had those qualities. Julie has surpassed all of our expectations,” explained Urdl.

Enter the discreet charm of actor/writer/director Gordon Pinsent, a Canadian icon. In what has been described by one journalist as a “career defining role,” Pinsent, at age 75, plays Grant Andersson, former university professor of mythology, now living in pastoral bliss with his wife of 50 years. The charisma which Grant used to his own benefit with young female students during his tenure, is still abundantly evident, but tempered by the realization that he is richer for what he has always had – Fiona.

“Gordon’s got a dignified quality and at the same time, he’s salt of the earth,” said Polley. “I love how completely different he and Julie are. It’s so inspiring when couples have been together for a long time, but retain their distinct and sometimes contradictory identities. These are people who have not melded into the couple monster.”

“Grant’s trying to be strong, but he’s also feeling weak and guilty and he can’t do anything to save the woman he loves. He plays all those emotions at the same time and it’s fascinating,” observed Urdl. Pinsent is well suited to the role of the husband given that he has been married for 43 years in real life.

“The initial reason I was attracted to this is because Sarah called me,” explained Pinsent. “I’d do anything for her. Then there’s the material, the role. It’s fantastic. In addition to the issue of Alzheimer’s, there is plenty going on underneath. And then we have Julie Christie and Olympia Dukakis. What’s not to like?” Speaking about his character’s past, Pinsent said, “Grant had a few flighty years, other women, students and drugs, but eventually realized Fiona was the true love of his life.”

“Fiona waited for him to grow up, waited for him to get it together,” Pinsent continued. “He reached a point in his manhood where married life couldn’t be better. When Fiona becomes ill, letting go of her was killing him. She had always been a bit flakey and he was in denial about her health. He couldn’t believe this is happening. It’s over. What’s left? Nothing but visiting because the disease does get worse. No matter what new people and new energies come into Grant’s life, nothing will ever, ever compare and to have that taken away from him is devastating and he enters a period of time where he has no answers.”

What comes into his life are three women: Madeleine the Meadowlake administrator, played by Wendy Crewson, Kristy, the head nurse at the facility, played by Kristen Thomson, and most notably, Marian, wife to Aubrey, the Meadowlake patient who is the object of Fiona’s affection. Marian is played by Olympia Dukakis and Aubrey, by Michael Murphy.

Olympia Dukakis, who was a spokesperson for the Alzheimer’s Association in the US, found Away From Her to be a story of abiding love in a shape and form that we don’t always see. “It’s a non-traditional look of love and the ongoing-ness of life,” she said. “We think things end, but really life continues to reinvent itself. My character, Marian, had a checkered marriage. I don’t think it was an easy one, but somehow she and Aubrey managed to stay together. When he became ill, she became his primary caregiver, without bitterness and without resentment. Their financial problems prevented her from putting him into a home fulltime, but she does briefly, to take advantage of a vacation. And therein the story turns because her husband meets Fiona. Out of his love for her, Grant contrives to give his wife what she needs which is another man and in doing so, Grant begins to find a new future with me. It’s as unexpected for me as it is for him. Marian could have stayed angry about what life had dished up or she could accept what has come her way. Sometimes, you just have to make a decision to be happy.”

The casting of Dukakis as Marian lifted a distinguished cast up to ingenious. “Olympia’s Marian is such a strong counterpoint to Fiona that Grant has his hands full. The important point in the story is that we didn’t want Marian to be victim of Grant’s charm, and we knew that with Olympia in that part, that would never be a possibility. This was essential to the balance of the story. If she was a victim, we would lose respect for Grant. Marian stands up to him in a way he had never experienced. They are both in a place where they need support and in no way does it mean they do not love their respective spouses. Life is what it is and it gives you what it does. You have to make the best of it and they do,” said Urdl.

Dukakis had known Polley previously, from when they worked on Thom Fitzgerald’s feature, The Event. She has even seen Polley’s short films. “But that doesn’t prepare you for the maturity of this script, for the complexity and the insight. It really is a fine piece of work.”

Playing Aubrey, Marian’s incapacitated husband who becomes the centre of Fiona’s world, is Michael Murphy. In 1971, he worked with Julie Christie on Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. In the intervening years, Murphy worked with Woody Allen, Paul Mazursky, Peter Weir, Tim Burton, Oliver Stone, Elia Kazan, Orson Welles and Paul Thomas Anderson. “Away From Her is so cutting edge,” Murphy declared. “This is one of the most interesting scripts I’ve read in a long time. I have nothing but admiration for Sarah. I have worked with a lot of great directors in this world and she is just right up there with the best.”

For such a talkative individual, playing the wordless Aubrey is an impressive about-face for Murphy. “Aubrey contracted a disease in the Third World and now he’s confined to a wheelchair and never speaks. He becomes very close with Fiona in a strangely romantic way and Grant becomes the interloper. The emotion is all conveyed through my face which I loved because I didn’t have to learn any lines,” he laughs. “So I am playing off the psychological. I do feel bad for the people working with me, like Gordon. It must be like working with a block of salt. What glorious actor that guy is. Julie and I worked together 35 years ago and became very good friends. She is no different now than she was then. Our relationship is right back where it was then, only better. I can get into those scenes with her big time. And Olympia, who I didn’t know before, is just great to work with. Everyone completely gives themselves over to their characters.”

Rounding out the key cast are Kristen Thomson as Kristy and Wendy Crewson as Madeleine.

Thomson, who starred in Polley’s award-winning short film, I Shout Love, and looked forward to working with her again, said, “For me Away From Her is a love story about a long term, deep, lifetime love so it doesn’t have the trappings of what we recognize in the romantic genre. It’s about two people at the other end of their romance, when they have to live apart for the first time, which is almost as heightened as when you first meet somebody. My character is a confidante for Grant. I help him work through some of the transition from being with his wife to coping with Alzheimers. Gordon’s a very heartfelt actor, his Grant cracks open slowly, letting the information seep in, accepting what is going on with his wife. He makes that subtle shift really engaging and dramatic. This isn’t about Alzheimer’s per se, but it is the galvanizing heart of the piece that Fiona and Grant have to walk through together.”

And finally Wendy Crewson stepped in to play the administrator of Meadowlake. Crewson, who is married to Michael Murphy, enjoyed having a character who talked circles around Murphy’s silent Aubrey. “It’s Sarah’s first feature and how honoured am I to be involved in this! I think she is such a talented woman, easy to be with, easy to work with. Sarah has written my character to be a detail-oriented, efficient supervisor who takes the brunt of Grant’s anger. “That anger,” Crewson observed, “is more his anger at the situation. The administration in places like this see a lot of resentment from the families and a lot of guilty spouses. Grant is a guilty husband.”

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Creating the Look of Away From Her

Cinematography

Award-winning cinematographer Luc Montpellier first met Sarah Polley when he shot her short film, I Shout Love. It was then they realized they had the same sensibilities. They worked together again on The Shield Stories, one episode of which Polley wrote and directed.

Montpellier understood the vital role winter played in the story and he wanted to capture the luminescent beauty of winter instead of focusing on its harshness. “My intention was to bathe Fiona and Grant’s relationship with cool winter source light, and stay away from warm, romantic clichés,” he explained. “Like a series of still photographs, these scenes play out within precisely composed frames letting the actors move about freely. The photographic style changes when we arrive at Meadowlake. Here, the Steadicam conveys Grant’s uneasiness with the place as he deals with the sorrow of what lies ahead for his wife.”

Montpellier’s biggest challenge was to communicate the human subtleties in a relationship plagued with Alzheimer’s, “What is memory? To answer that, I shot segments on a hand-held, hand-cranked Paillard Bolex H-16 converted to Super-16. The Bolex’s frame registration gave the images an un-fluid quality, sometimes full of clarity, and other times clouded by emotion, that I believe mirrors my experience with memory. Sarah and I then worked together on the computer to digitally manipulate the sequences to explore the look of memory.”

Locations

While Environment Canada reported that January 2006 went down in history as the mildest January in recorded history for many locations in Ontario, the first morning of principal photography at Lake of Bays near Bracebridge, Ontario began at a brisk minus 33 Celsius. Producer Jennifer Weiss recalled, “Everyone’s eyelashes had crystallized. We were shooting on a frozen lake and it was exquisite. From the beginning, we wanted to capture rural Canada in a cinematic style. These locations, especially the exteriors, are crucial to understanding these people and the life they have set up for themselves. They’ve made the choice to make life simpler. But life isn’t always simple and there is always history.”

Alice Munro’s work is a testament to society and culture in rural and small town Ontario, Canada. For Production Designer Cathleen Climie, this meant revisiting locations of her youth. “Marian’s house is a perfect example: even though the house was not described in the script, I felt exactly what that house was to be. When we went to see it, it turned out that this was identical to the house that Sarah grew up in, same floor plan, same suburban neighbourhood,” she said. Climie likes to get inside a character’s head before designing the space they inhabit. For Marian, the interior is very structured. For Fiona, the cottage is comfortable. “Fiona has curtains,” explained Climie. “Marian has drapes.” It is the move to Meadowlake which required a delicate shift in perspective. “Meadowlake, the location, was the embodiment of the transition in Fiona’s life from outdoors to indoors, from reality to a memory of that reality and from nature to an oversized wall mural of nature mural in the facility visiting area.”

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