(Edited May 21st, 8:30am, PST)
I sipped my morning coffee and re read my initial review of Away From Her and felt that I needed to revise it a bit. So, here is the revised text. Not much has been removed, but a few additions have been made.
I always get annoyed when a film is stated to be a directors debut, when in fact it's not. Sarah Polley has directed film prior to Away From Her, they all just happened to be short subjects. Maybe this is why Away From Her feels like it should have been as well.
I didn't want to start this review with a criticism. Not only is it bad form, but Away From Her is a mostly successful film and it's merits are worth celebrating. It is just that all of those merits are in the first 50 minutes to an hour of this film. I won't go into the plot, that's easy enough to find out about somewhere these days, but let's just say that once Fiona (Julie Christie) leaves Grant (Gordon Pinsent) to live at the retirement home, the dramatic engine of the film is spent. The scenes building up to and resolving this event are dramatically rendered, and Polley deserves praise for her handling of this, essentially, climatic moment.
Unfortunately, the movie lasts another hour, which gives the audience time to dwell on the flaws of the film. More on these later, after I mention some of the good things about Away From Her, almost all of which are related to the performers.
Yes, it's true; the acting in Away From Her is, almost without exception, superb. Polley's greatest achievement with this film is her choice of cast. Julie Christie has the easier, showy role, but manages to keep things on the better side of show business. Despite her age, she's still beautiful but manages to hide that when needed. It makes those rare glimpses much more powerful. As good as she is, the show stopper here is Gordon Pinsent. His character, Grant, is really the lead role in this film; it is not Fiona's loss of memory which gives emotional depth to Away From Her, it's Grant's loss of his wife and life. Pinsent brings a dignity and grace to a man who is forced to watch as he loses everything. Unlike Fiona, Grant does not have the luxury of forgetting, and Pinsent conveys this grief and fear with a poetic efficiency. Polley, for the most part, is a smart enough director to get out of the way and let her cast do what she hired them to do.
Polly keeps the film simple, which allows the actor's room. There is no heavy handed editing and the production design doesn't bring attention to itself. For the first half of the film, these choices work. As I have said however, the second half of the film is lacks any dramatic tension, leaving the viewer lots of time to think about just what Polley is doing. In the end, these minimal elements become the one of the films major weaknesses.
What in the first half of Away From Her was viewed as a selective minimalism, in the second half makes one question Polley's abilities. Her sense of cinema's formal construction is not very well developed. Without the tense dramatics of two veteran actors to carry a scene, Polley's visual/formal construction becomes a series of dull frames. This wouldn't be such a bad thing if the cinematography was more impressive.
Obviously, a film like Away From Her does not require a super stylist like Chris Doyle or Robert Richardson to shoot it, but it does need a consistent photographic beauty. All films need that and it's absence hurts this film badly. The lighting here is flat and the framing uninteresting. The set ups are by the book and when Polley does attempt anything other than a wide 2 shot or a dramatic close up, it feels contrived and horribly out of place. (For example, the high angle, over head shot in the woods, or those slow motion dolly away shots in the hallway of the retirement home.) Those scenes would have been better served by fitting into the overall visual style, no matter how uninteresting it is. Without the emotional, dramatic, content, Polley's lack of cinematic narrative skills become all too obvious.
She could have compensated for this however, seeing as she also wrote the script. Alas, I'm sorry to say that the script to Away From Her really needed a trip to the doctor. Much of the dialogue is stilted and heavy handed. It tries too hard to be profound. Christie and Pinsent are skilled enough to deliver this dialouge with feeling, but it doesn't hide the fact that the script was written to be "meaningful". Everything is said, not shown. Maybe in the 60's, in Europe, this would be seen as innovative and powerful writing, but today, it's simply wooden.
Structurally, Away From Her is oddly weighted. As I've said, the emotional climax takes place around the halfway through point of the film. At this point the narrative shifts protagonists from Fiona to Grant; an interesting, brave but, ultimately, faulty choice. Whereas Fiona's character had Grant to play against, Polley is forced to add characters for Grant to interact with. To integrate the two halves of the film, the plot of Away From Her jumps around a bit (There are two distinct series of flashbacks and one significant series of flash forwards.) In the first half of the film, it works, but once in the second half of the story, and these characters are now needed to further things, their under development becomes apparent. All of these characters are well acted, but that doesn't hide the fact that these secondary characters exist as structural devices to extend the story. Perhaps if one of these minor characters was fleshed out, it would have created a second emotional conflict to counter point or resolve the first. This was obviously the function the character Marian (Olympia Dukakis) was to play, but the relationship between Marian and Grant is under developed and never dramatically convincing.
Combine the visual banality with this overly mechanical, overly "serious" script and you get one hell of a "Canadian" film. It's unfair perhaps to single out Polley for these faults; they turn up in almost every English Canadian film. She's not even the worst offender. While I was expecting a small amount of these symptoms to be present, I was hoping that she might have learned a thing or two from a few of the non Canadian directors she has worked with. Apparently, if she has, she's saving that knowledge for later. Which is a shame.
All of that said, it is a bold film for a young filmmaker to attempt. The first half of the film is heart breaking. For bravery alone, Polley deserves attention and the support in making another film.
And attention she's getting. Over at Metacritic, Away From Her is the fifth highest rated film so far this year. It has critics using big "Quote Me Please" catch phrases. I do think I read the word masterpiece in there somewhere. Much of the praise is built around the drastic age difference between Polley and her characters. It's a subject I don't want to get into in any detail, but I suggest this; Away From Her is not a film about age. The characters could have been 20 something's and, with a few changes in the details, the basic premise of Away From Her would remain. Actually, it probably would have been a better film, but that's another essay.
Oh, and one last thing; Is it just me, or does Gordon Pinsent in this film look just like a famous Canadian rocker?
Away From Her - IMDB
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