Away From Her

Although she was only in her 20s, Sarah Polley was already a veteran actress when she set out to direct her first feature film. For this intended debut, she had written a screenplay about a child performer in a television series; familiar territory for the former star of Canadian programs Ramona (1988) and Road to Avonlea (1990-1996).¹ After multiple rejections, however, this project was shelved. The film that Polley made instead, Away From Her (2006), would seem by comparison much further removed from her life experience to that point, dealing as it does with the experience of aging. It was an adaptation of Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain,’ a short story centred on a woman who is “direct and vague… sweet and ironic”; elusive to even, or perhaps especially, her husband of almost 50 years. 

Polley first read Munro’s story on a return flight from Iceland, where she had been filming Hal Hartley’s off-beat monster movie No Such Thing (2001).² Among her scene partners in that film was the great British actress, Julie Christie. “I read [‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’] and I just couldn’t get Julie’s face out of my mind,” Polley recalled.³

It would take some time for the actress to agree to the role. By the early 2000s, Christie, an icon of the 1960s and ‘70s, had been mostly out of the spotlight for decades. Semi-retired for a period, she had in more recent years given notable performances in Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh, 1996) and Afterglow (Alan Rudolph, 1997), alongside minor appearances in big-budget fare like Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón, 2004). Christie admitted to taking on some of these projects for “financial reasons” as opposed to any particular passion for the parts she was being offered.⁴ In her retelling, the eventual decision to star in Polley’s film was motivated by her existing relationship with the younger actress: “I didn’t want to make any film,” she said. “[But] I did it because I didn’t want to risk losing the intensity of that friendship [with Polley] by not participating with her on her first exploration into filmmaking.”⁵

With hindsight, it’s hard to imagine a version of Away From Her without Christie’s immense presence. As Fiona, a woman in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease who decides to go into residential care, Christie is immediately credible, commanding and astonishingly beautiful on screen. Even as her mind begins to fail her, Fiona remains outwardly stoic, her sense of humour and grace still firmly intact. Her manner and voice are gentle, but with just a half-smile, an eyebrow raise, or a slackening of the mouth, Christie reveals something more complex and tortured beneath this composed exterior; pain that has been present since even before the onset of her condition. When Fiona’s husband Grant (the late Gordon Pinsent) describes her, on the day of her relocation, as “direct and vague, sweet and ironic” – just as Munroe had written – Christie’s expression bares a lifetime. After enduring a mandated month of separation from his beloved wife, Grant is received by her with cordial detachment, her affections having apparently transferred to brooding fellow resident Aubrey (Michael Murphy). Reflecting on his past indiscretions, he wonders if Fiona has really forgotten their decades of marriage, or if she is instead knowingly punishing him. 

Polley retains the economy of Munro’s biographical character descriptions. In pieces, we learn that Grant has been playing catch-up to Fiona their whole married life. They met when she was 18. It was she who proposed to him. Her family was Icelandic; he taught Norse Mythology at university. He was a philanderer and had inappropriate relations with his students. They eventually settled in a cottage that once belonged to her grandparents. Although it is Grant who continues to occupy their home after Fiona has left, her presence is indelible, somehow still clearer and more spirited than his. 

Polley’s dialogue is also very faithful to the original text, with several passages left virtually unchanged. But while the elliptical structure of Munro’s short story – and in particular its ambiguous ending – lends itself to multiple possible interpretations, Polley’s adaptation presents something more straightforward. Whereas Munro partly obfuscates, or at least complicates, the motivations of both characters, Polley valorises Grant as unquestionably dedicated to his wife’s happiness, even at the cost of his own. Reflecting on the process of translating literary works to the screen at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, Polley spoke of the impossibility of recreating every reader’s experience of a text, and the need to instead be authentic to her own individual response. “When you’re making a book or a short story into a film,” she said, “you’re not really sharing the story…  what you’re sharing is your experience [of the story].”⁶ In Polley’s hands, the narrative of Grant and Fiona’s separation and eventual reconciliation is deeply emotional and feels pointedly personal. 

As part of the same Q&A discussion, Polley drew a connection between Away From Her and her extraordinary documentary Stories We Tell (2012). The latter feature revolves around Polley’s mother who passed away when she was 11, and the revelation, uncovered only when the filmmaker was already an adult, that the father she grew up with was not her biological parent. “I realised when I made [Stories We Tell] that a lot of the issues that I was eventually going to explore in that film, kind of started with [Away From Her],” Polley said. Polley’s documentary lovingly presents her mother, Diane – an actress and casting director – as vibrant, complicated and secretive, even with those closest to her. In a way, this is reflected in Fiona, who is a mystery to Grant, to us as viewers and, increasingly, to herself. It was not until years after the production of her debut film that Polley realised that, in crafting a shot of young Fiona (Stacey LaBerge), she had subconsciously drawn from real Super 8 footage of her mother.  “It was very deeply imbedded in my own history,” she said.⁷ 

In her next feature after Away From Her, the lovely Take This Waltz (2011), Polley would again centre a woman romantically involved with two men, one to whom she is married. This time, the characters would be much closer to Polley’s own age. Ten years passed between Stories We Tell and Polley’s subsequent film, Women Talking (2022), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The same year Polley published an essay collection, Run Towards the Danger.

Polley has often mentioned the influence of Atom Egoyan – the Armenian-Canadian director who served as executive producer on Away From Her – on her filmmaking. In each of Egoyan’s dark melodramas Exotica (1994) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Polley featured as a precocious young girl caught in a perverse dynamic with a grown male relative. Her performance in the latter film, which required her to interpret extremely confronting subject matter while still only a teenager herself, is especially remarkable. Egoyan praised Polley as a sensitive and observant actor. Sharing the advice he offered her during Away From Her’s production, he recounted: “the actor is the only person who is doing something genuinely magical on set – and that has to be protected at all costs.”⁸

Like Christie did earlier in her career, Polley made a choice to step back from acting prematurely. In her remarkable essay “The Men You Meet Making Movies,” she detailed her experiences as a young woman in the film industry, including interactions with Harvey Weinstein. Reminiscing on Away From Her, Polley wrote:

I had the privilege of working with Julie Christie, who, while maintaining her vision for her character, was deeply committed to collaboration and could shift her performance on a dime when given direction. It was an amazing gift for a director, still learning the ropes. I realized that in the past, whether I’d known it or not, some part of me had been afraid of direction. I vowed to go back to acting with my newfound understanding of collaboration. I would be more pliable. I was excited to give my whole, unfettered self to a director, the way Julie Christie had done for me. But I had forgotten a key ingredient of the acting process. Most directors are insensitive men.⁹

Away From Her (2006 Canada 110 mins)

Prod Co: The Film Farm/ Foundry Films/Capri Releasing/ Hanway Films/Echo Lake Productions Prod: Daniel Iron, Simone Urdl, Jennifer Weiss Dir: Sarah Polley Scr: Sarah Polley, based on ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ by Alice Munro Phot: Luc Montpellier Ed: David Wharnsby Mus: Jonathan Goldsmith 

Cast: Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis, Michael Murphy, Kristen Thomson, Wendy Crewson, Nina Dobrev, Stacey LaBerge, Deanna Dezmari, Thomas Hauff, Alberta Watson

Endnotes