If I had not already known that Sarah Polley directed Away From Her, I never would have guessed the movie’s creator to be anywhere under the age of 50. I certainly would not have guessed that she is 28. I never would have thought her personal experience with marriage to be less than four years.

But as a young person around the same age as Polley, I have no trouble understanding how she was drawn to a story that looks at the struggle of Alzheimer’s with a lens that few dare to peer though and paints a picture of love and commitment unlike so many stereotypes that have just become too difficult to believe. I have no trouble understanding because even though the story is about as far away from our own young inexperienced lives as you can get, everything Away From Her is about sits as close to my heart as anything could get.

“I should be so lucky,” says a young teen to Gordon Pinsent’s Grant as they both watch Grant’s wife Fiona eating her Christmas dinner with another man.

He has just told the girl that he is Fiona’s husband; the man beside her that she seems to have fallen in love with is not. But as Grant sits there and watches how happy Fiona is in company of another man, the only thought on his mind is being there to make sure she is doing well.

Fiona has Alzheimer’s. And as the movie shows, its progression has brought changes to Grant and Fiona’s life that neither of them could have imagined. Portrayed with such subtle realism through the course of the everyday, the disease almost comes alive as a tragically mysterious dance that takes away from those it touches piece by tiny piece by tiny piece. A misplaced frying pan. A forgotten name. A loss of place and direction. A lapse in time and space and life.

We see the disease steal from Fiona the ability to make sense of things she has always understood. As it progresses, she regresses. It takes away things she has learned and things she has made it through. It takes away the knowledge and security of what has passed and returns her to the uncertainty and insecurity of unstable times and unresolved issues.

And so, Fiona and Grant make the difficult decision for Fiona to enter a care facility. For the first time in 50 years, they exchange a see-you-later that mandates a separation of thirty whole days. But before they can say hello again, the disease inside Fiona’s mind says goodbye to Grant again and again as it slowly and steadily steals away the memories that give Fiona any sense that Grant is the one who has always been and will always be the love of her life.

The situation is one of confusion, panic, distress, and even anger. The rift between Grant’s knowledge of the love he and Fiona have shared and Fiona’s inability to even begin to grasp its foundations is torturous. For Grant, the maddening threat of being unable to get his love through to Fiona even makes him wonder if all of this is fate’s cruel punishment for his failure to love her fully for even the briefest portion of their many years together.  As a fellow patient and former sports’ announcer commentates from the sidelines of Grant and Fiona’s situation, “As we come down the hall, there’s a man with a broken heart, broken into a thousand pieces.” 

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