? A retired professor (Gordon Pinsent) struggles with the decision to institutionalize his wife (Julie Christie), who’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. The Canadian drama is the feature directorial debut for actress Sarah Polley, who adapted Alice Munro’s story “The Bear Came over the Mountain.”
+ This might be seen as non-Hallmark card version of The Notebook, an idyllic sap-fest in which Alzheimer’s seems like an inconvenience that love can overcome. The marriage here is a good one, but not idyllic, and the husband eventually realizes that his love cannot overcome the disease’s progression, and that his attentiveness to his mate is really about his own needs and not hers. The way in which he adapts to this realization lies at the center of the story, which Polley arrives at by cleverly interspersing flash-forward sequences in which the husband arrives unbidden at the door of another woman (Olympia Dukakis) he doesn’t know for a purpose that only becomes clear later in the movie. The movie is touching in ways you expect and ways you don’t, as when a caring nursing-home worker gives the husband an unexpected reality check. It’s also nice to see the still-striking Christie in such a good role.
- I could quibble with small things, but almost everything about this movie is just right. I wanted it to go on a little longer.
= ***1/2 Although Sarah Polley has appeared in a couple of American movies (Go, Dawn of the Dead), she’s eschewed greater fame by mostly appearing in character-driven Canadian films like Guinevere and My Life Without Me. She’s made the same kind of movie as writer-director, and done so brilliantly.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0491747/
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