Movies
about Alzheimer’s are more numerous than I realized. Back in 2007, Roger Ebert mentioned
he had reviewed five such movies in the first seven years of this century. They
included Iris, an elegiac biopic
about the superb British writer Iris Murdoch, who died of Alzheimer’s in 1999. The
most memorable scene in Iris comes
when Murdoch, played by Judi Dench, blanks out during a live television
interview.
A movie that came out in 2006, Away From Her, featuring Julie Christie, and directed by Sarah Polley, struck a
very different tone. Unlike the 2014 movie, Still
Alice, featuring Julianne Moore as a Harvard linguist who has a rare and
fast-moving variant of the disease, Away
From Her depicts a woman who finds the disease liberating. Not that Fiona
needs encouraging. She and her husband live in rural Ontario, and when she gets
lost in the woods while cross-country skiing, rather than panicking, she throws
herself on her back and stares up at the snow falling from the boughs overhead,
as if she were making a snow angel. Grant dutifully retrieves her.
The ironic style of this film derives from the Canadian
author Alice Munro, one of Paula and my favorite writers, and the winner of the
2013 Nobel Prize in literature. One of Munro’s stories was the basis of Away From Her. A key point in the movie comes when the decision is made that
Fiona can no longer be trusted to live without assistance. One scene depicts
her leaving a burner on, risking a fire, and soon preparations are underway to
transfer her to a care facility. And, rather protesting the decision to leave
her home, she embraces it. It turns out that the pricey care facility has a
rather odd policy about loved ones: No one can visit until 30 days have passed.
As I was watching the film, I thought, how awful it must be to be dumped in a
nursing home, no matter how upscale, and not see your loved ones for an entire
month.
And much can happen in that span. The surprise comes once
Fiona is reunited with her husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent). Grant soon grasps
that she is enjoying herself—too much, in fact, in Grant’s view. Early on, the film
makes clear that Grant, a former college professor, had a long career as a
philanderer. It is only in his senior years that he has been loyal to Fiona.
Now, at the care facility, he quickly learns that Fiona has become romantically
involved with one of the male residents. Grant himself strikes up a friendship,
or at least a confidence, with a middle-age care attendant. Only fleetingly
does this movie pause to let viewers see the unpleasantries which await people
with Alzheimer’s in the terminal stage. This is one cheery Alzheimer’s film.
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