Watch: Away from Her 2006 123movies, Full Movie Online – Grant and Fiona Anderson have been married for forty-four years. Their marriage has been a generally happy and loving one although not perfect due to some indiscretions when Grant was working as a college professor. Fiona has just been admitted to Meadowlake, a long term care facility near their country home in southwestern Ontario, because her recent lapses of memory have been diagnosed as a probable case of Alzheimer’s disease. She and Grant made this decision together, although a still lucid Fiona seems to have made peace with the decision and her diagnosis more so than Grant. With respect to the facility, what Grant has the most difficulty with are what he sees as the sadness associated with the facility’s second floor – where the more advanced cases are housed – but most specifically the facility’s policy of no visitors within the first thirty days of admission to allow the patient to adjust more easily to their new life there. Based on what he sees when he is finally able to visit Fiona, Grant ultimately makes a request of Marian Barque, the wife of one of the other patients, a semi-comatose Aubrey Barque, with whom Fiona has struck a friendship and who is now at home permanently with Marian. The request is to see to both Fiona and his own happiness in this unfortunate situation..
Plot: A man coping with the institutionalization of his wife because of Alzheimer’s disease faces an epiphany when she transfers her affections to another man, a wheel chair-bound mute who also is a patient at the nursing home.
Smart Tags: #nursing_home #alzheimer’s_disease #skiing #fisher #ontario #wine_bottle #forgetting_a_name #washing_dishes #wine_glass #frying_pan #reading_aloud_from_a_book #candlelight_dinner #conservation_area #sticker #daffodil #coffee_machine #stained_glass_window #santa_claus_statue #christmas_tree #party_hat #sunflower
123movies | FMmovies | Putlocker | GoMovies | SolarMovie | Soap2day
7.5/10 Votes: 22,325 | |
94% | RottenTomatoes | |
88/100 | MetaCritic | |
N/A Votes: 178 Popularity: 8.584 | TMDB |
Remarkable debut by director Sarah Polley and yet another fascinating performance by Julie Christie
Julie Christie’s combination of talent, beauty and brains has enthralled me over four decades. Nearly a decade ago, her Oscar nominated performance in “Afterglow” established that she was not a spent force while playing a gracefully aging wife of a handyman in the US. One thought that would be her best turn at geriatric impersonations.Less than a decade later, Christie comes up with an even better performance of a woman coping with Alzheimer’s disease in a debut directorial effort “Away from Her” of Canadian actress Sarah Polley. I saw the film today at the ongoing International Film Festival of Kerala, India, where Ms Christie, serving on the jury for the competition section, introduced her film thus: “It is immaterial whether you are rich or poor–we cannot predict what can happen to us. Enjoy the film with this thought.” Ms Christie probably put in her best effort because the young director considers Ms Christie to be her “adoptive” mother, having worked together on three significant movie projects in five years. The film’s subject brings memories of two similar films: Pierre Granier-Deferre’ film “Le Chat” that won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for both Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret in 1971 and Paul Mazursky’s “Harry and Tonto” which won an Oscar for the lead actor Art Carney in 1974. This performance of Julie Christie ranks alongside those winners.
Today geriatric care is a growing problem. This film is a sensitive look at parting of married couples when one of them needs institutional care. Ms Polley’s choice of the actor Gordon Pinsent is an intelligent one as the film relies on his narration and Mr Pinsent’s deep voice provides the right measure of gravitas. Olympia Dukakis is another fine actor playing a lady who has “quit quitting”. So is Michael Murphy doing a lengthy role without saying a word.
The strengths of the film are the subject, the direction, the performances and the seamless editing by the director’s spouse. It is not a film that will attract young audiences who are insensitive. Yet the film has a evocative scene where a young teenager with several parts of her body pierced by rings is totally amazed by the devotion of the aging husband for his wife. So in a way the film reaches out to different age groups. Though it talks about sex, it can be safe family viewing material.
Chances are that most viewers will love the film if they are interested in films that are different from “the American films that get shown in multiplexes” to quote a character in the film. More importantly this film advertises the problem of Alzheimer’s disease eloquently and artistically. It prepares you for future shocks.
A love like fresh snow underfoot . . .
I remember the last time I saw my mother. I sat on the end of her bed, strumming guitar, and singing a song she used to sing to us as children. I hoped she might remember it. She would probably not, however, recognise her son. Or even speak. She had Alzheimer’s.After self-righteous ‘disease of the week’ movies such as Iris, it is maybe hard to imagine a riveting, nuanced love story of depth and imagination, one centred on loss of memory, but Away From Her succeeds in spades.
Fiona (Julie Christie) has been married to Grant for 44 years. They have reached a stage of lifetime love based on deep knowledge of each other and acceptance of past misdemeanours. Then Fiona’s memory starts to fail. As her Alzheimer’s begins to need 24hr care, she checks in to Meadowlake residential centre. There she not only forgets who her husband is, but develops an affection for another patient an affection that holds all the tenderness she used to share with her (now onlooking) husband.
Says Producer Simone Urdl, “The role of Alzheimer’s in the film is a metaphor for how memory plays out in a long term relationship: what we chose to remember, what we choose to forget.” And our ability to recall things, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, is highly selective.
Secure in the knowledge that he has given his wife many years of happiness, Grant glosses over his unfaithfulness in their younger days. But Fiona’s early memories stay longer, and come back to haunt him. To bring his wife joy now, he is driven to encourage her towards that which gives him most pain.
Away From Her takes us from frozen, luminescent mise-en-scene of the couple’s secure existence in snow-drenched, rural Canada, to the hand-held cameras and uncertainty that hits in Meadowlake. Excerpts from Auden’s Letters From Iceland are sprinkled into the script like shards of crystalline beauty. Julie Christie, for whom the lead role was written, exudes dynamic good looks and the vibrancy of a young woman, bathed in such warmth and passion of years. When she asks Grant to make love to her before leaving, there is an urgency and scintillating sexiness about her.
Away From Her sparkles as we watch Grant walk his emotional tight-rope. The movie is made with such surety that it comes as a shock to realise the director is a first time filmmaker in her twenties. Sarah Polley evokes Bergman, as she too touches “wordless secrets only the cinema can discover.” This talented young woman is highly selective in her acting roles and now, behind the camera, impresses with her insight and intelligence.
My last conversation with my mother, before she was institutionalised, or I even realised what was happening, was a long distance phone call. After chatting happily for five minutes, she said, quite chirpily and very politely, “What’s your name again?” Memory is not always a two-way process. Nor objective. But, like this film, it can be mesmerising, heart-wrenching, and a remarkably intimate vision.
Original Language en
Runtime 1 hr 50 min (110 min)
Budget 3000000
Revenue 9194283
Status Released
Rated PG-13
Genre Drama
Director Sarah Polley
Writer Sarah Polley, Alice Munro
Actors Julie Christie, Michael Murphy, Gordon Pinsent
Country Canada, United Kingdom, United States
Awards Nominated for 2 Oscars. 62 wins & 42 nominations total
Production Company N/A
Website N/A
Sound Mix Dolby Digital
Aspect Ratio 1.85 : 1
Camera Panavision Panaflex Millennium XL, Panavision Primo Lenses, Panavision Panaflex Millennium, Panavision Primo Lenses
Laboratory Technicolor
Film Length N/A
Negative Format 35 mm (Kodak)
Cinematographic Process Digital Intermediate (master format), Super 35 (source format)
Printed Film Format 35 mm