Avonlea to auteur?
Sarah Polley draws high praise for her work directing Away From Her
John Kendle

Away From Her was first screened in Winnipeg at the NSI FilmExchange festival in March, but most locals will get their chance to see the film when it opens here on May 11.

Then they’ll finally see why such a fuss is being made about this wonderful little movie about the consequences of Alzheimer’s and the nature of love.

Starring Canadian acting legend Gordon Pinsent and Academy Award-winner Julie Christie (best actress in 1966 for Darling), Away From Her premiered last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, where its emotional depth and intensity won praise not only for the performances of its stars but also for its screenwriter and director — Canadian actress Sarah Polley.

Just 28, Polley is fast becoming an accomplished filmmaker, and Away From Her has put her on the fast track to acclaim. Accolades at TIFF were repeated at the Sundance Festival in Utah and, two days after Uptown to spoke to Polley, she was named a juror at the 60th Festival de Cannes, to be held later this month.

Away From Her was adapted by Polley from the Alice Munro short story The Bear Came Over the Mountain, which the filmmaker read while on a plane home from Iceland.

The story haunted Polley. She has said that, having just worked with Christie on Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing, she kept seeing the older woman’s face in the role of Fiona Andersson, a woman married for 50 years who loses all memory of her husband, Grant (Pinsent), just a month after entering a retirement home that specializes in treating Alzheimer’s.

As the story unfolds, Fiona becomes attached to Aubrey (Michael Murphy), another patient at the care home, leaving Grant and Marian (Olympia Dukakis), Aubrey’s wife, to deal with the loss of their spouses while both are still alive.

Polley says it shouldn’t be too surprising that someone as young as she could make such a heart-wrenchingly delicate film.

“The moments that I am most drawn to in any kind of art are the moments of grace in the middle of heartbreak or great tragedy,” she explains. “So I guess that extends into the kind of roles that I choose to play as an actor and what I’m interested in speaking about as a filmmaker.

“I found (Munro’s story) the most profoundly interesting portrait of a marriage and a love story that I’d ever read,” she says. “I thought it was so interesting the way she dealt with memory and what memory does and how it drives us and how it informs our relationships in ways that we don’t necessarily understand.”

What has captivated many viewers of Away From Her is the manner in which the young writer/director has captured the intimacy of a 50-year marriage even though she’d been married (to film editor David Wharnsby) just three years when the film was shot in early 2006.

“I think (the movie) absolutely made me think about marriage and what it means to be with someone for so long and what unconditional love means,” she says.

Proud as she is of the praise heaped on Away From Her, Polley is quick to point to her veteran cast as crucial to the emotional connections of the film. She chose her actors for their open qualities but admits that, at 27 when shooting started, she did have several ‘what am I doing?’ moments when working with a Canadian icon and an Academy Award winner.

“There were a few of those, especially at the beginning, when it was a reality and we were rehearsing,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Who I am to tell them what to do?’ and ‘What can I possibly offer them as a director?’

“(But) they were incredibly nurturing towards me and supportive of me in this new role, so I felt very welcomed into their process.”

Polley laughs as she describes Pinsent, 76, and Christie, 66, as real-life polar opposites who nevertheless meshed superbly in front of her camera.

“They hadn’t met at all and you couldn’t find two more different people with different ways of seeing the world and such different life experiences, and I think that’s why I loved the idea of them as a couple,” the director says. “I always feel like the couples that seem to work the best, who have been together for a long time, are the couples who haven’t become the ‘couple-monster.’

“They haven’t grown into the two-headed person and have both really retained themselves, and it’s that kind of distance between who they are that is where the chemistry exists.”

Polley says that making the film was a collaborative effort. She took notes from Pinsent and Christie as the actors explored their characters, and she clearly valued the opinions of her story editor Kristen Thomson (who is cast as a nurse in the movie) and her husband.

But it is also clear that the driving force behind Away From Her was hers alone. She speaks with a certainty that leaves no doubt who was in charge. As with all creative projects, she was challenged at times but she clearly stood her ground.

“If there was something that I felt was integral to the piece I would fight for it or at least try to explain it to the point at which we all understood it,” she says.

Polley has yet to meet Munro, writer of the original short story, but says the author has left her a couple of messages.

“There was one saying she’d read the script and liked it. Another was her response to a foreword I had written for a new collection that’s coming out. But she hasn’t seen the movie yet, at least not that I’m aware.”

Speaking two weeks before the movie opened to the public in Toronto and Vancouver, Polley was pleased that Away From Her would finally be seen by the general public.

She’s been thrilled by the positive critical reaction but really wants the movie to find its audience.

“I was a lot more surprised by the reaction at TIFF than I was at by the reaction at Sundance,” she says.

“I think it’s the curse of Canadian films that Canadian journalists just generally hate them on contact. So it was a big shock for me that it was well received here.

“What I’m really looking forward to is the film getting out of the realm of the film industry and being seen by people who don’t work in film.”

Asked what’s next in her film-making life, Polley says she is working on two scripts at the moment. One is original, the other an adaptation.