Tuesday Morning Pages - Away From Her

On my walk this morning thought a lot about a sad, small, funny Canadian film I stayed up much too late last night watching, Away From Her, which was written and directed by Canada's multi-talented--and amazingly young--Sarah Polley, Christie's friend and former co-star, and is based on Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain."

Away From Her stars Julie Christie, stunning as a well-to-do woman named Fiona who is succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease, and the pouchy, shambling Canadian actor-director Gordon Pinsent, excellent as her anguished husband Grant, a retired university professor with a past history of philandering. Olympia Dukakis is in the movie also and she is just devastating as the angry, grieving survivor spouse of the nearly unrecognizable Michael Murphy, remarkable in a wordless performance as a man physically and mentally wrecked by the disease who nevertheless forms an intensely emotional bond with Christie’s Fiona. I am making note to find Away’s haunting soundtrack, or at least k.d. lang’s mournful rendition of Neil Young’s plaintive classic “Helpless.”

My goodness, how old is Julie Christie now? I think this year she is or will be 67. Or 68. It’s hard to comprehend this. I keep remembering Julie Christie as the belle of the swinging sixties ball, radiant in iconic films like Darling, Dr. Zhivago and Petulia, I keep seeing her carefree and freewheeling, swinging her hand bag like a little girl on holiday as she ambles along a London street in her debut film, 1963’s Billy Liar. John Schlesinger was her best director, with Richard Lester coming a close second. (You may dispute me on this, for all the good it will do you.)

Christie is still radiant. There’s that moment in Away From Her where she is standing in her home gazing pensively out a window and her long beautiful hair is loose around her shoulders. Her husband, watching her with a mixture of love and dread, calls to her. She turns to him and her blank reaction to his question freezes him to stone, then suddenly she gives him a wide warm smile—she understood him perfectly, she was only teasing. With that familiar broad smile and the luxuriant hair softly framing her luminous face, even the way she wears that big striped blouse (68 or no Christie still has the figure of a coed and looks fabulous in those expensive sweaters and tailored slacks), she is once again the winning, winsome young girl who was once the pride of Mod Britain’s Carnaby Street. Even the ravages of time, real and cinematic, can’t diminish her.

Inevitably, while watching the movie I thought of my maternal grandmother, Mary, who died in 1990 in a suburban nursing home, a clenched and shrunken shell of her former vibrant self. The Away From Her DVD is of course preceded by the usual annoying barrage of coming attractions but there is also a PSA for the Alzheimer’s Association featuring a collection of celebrities that includes Dukakis (whose mother died of Alzheimer’s), Dick Van Dyke, Vivica A. Fox, NBC News’s Natalie Morales, Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce, and actor Victor Garber, who lost both his parents to Alzheimer’s. Both parents, my God… Just how epidemic is this ghastly disease?

Away From Her makes me want to go back and try again to revise and expand "With Grandma, In Winter," a short piece I wrote a few years ago. I abandoned previous attempts because it just wasn’t coming together and after awhile I was afraid I was only ruining the original essay. Maybe now I can do it. I don't know.

I miss my grandmother; miss her sheepish little laugh, her strange, distinctive gait, her quirky conversation, the unique pleasures of her company. So many things evoke her memory and our past times together—just walking up Woodlawn Avenue past our old apartment on 54th Street does that, or wandering through the stately gardens of St. Thomas Apostle and then on toward the Friendly Club, her favorite “keen-ager” hangout. Spiked Christmas egg nog. Zane Grey paperbacks. The Music Man, My Fair Lady and The Untouchables. The drycleaner on the corner and the theologian bookseller—I see echoes of her everywhere, anywhere I look. But it’s such a melancholy feeling; echoes are not enough. I want her back, as she was, before bewilderment and paralysis enveloped and consumed her, before she began to disappear right in front of our eyes.

The final scene of Away From Her simply shatters me. For any who have yet to see this lovely little movie I won’t spoil it for you with specifics, except to say that the ending is all irony and heartbreak and a very black humor; you thinking That’s it, time to let go, pack it in and try to move on—only to be surprised and hauled back again to what you thought irretrievably lost; and now where are we? Where are we now?