"Isn't it true however far we've wandered into our provinces of persecution, where our regrets accuse, we keep returning back to the common faith from which we've all dissented, back to the hands, the feet, the faces? Children are always there and take the hands, even when they are most terrified. Those in love cannot make up their minds to go or stay. Artist and doctor return most often. Only the mad will never, never come back. For doctors keep on worrying while away, in case their skill is suffering or deserted. Lovers have lived so long with giants and elves, they want belief again in their own size. And the artist prays ever so gently, let me find pure all that can happen. Only uniqueness is success." - W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland

(2006) Inspired by Alice Munro's short story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," Canadian actress Sarah Polley wrote the screenplay and directed this heartrending, unsentimental film about a 62-year-old woman's living with Alzheimer's disease and her husband's unstinting efforts to make her life more bearable.

Married for 44 years to Grant Andersson (Gordon Pinsent), a retired professor of Norse mythology, Fiona (Julie Christie) realizes she's losing her ability to recall the names of things, putting labels on items and making lists for herself. "Once the idea is gone," she admits, experiencing a feeling of disappearing along with her memories, "everything is gone."

Eventually, after getting lost while out cross-country skiing by herself, she acknowledges having "reached that stage" of needing to be in a nursing home; it is her decision, she makes clear to her husband. As Grant drives her to Meadowlake in January - the new, modern facility he's seen earlier, given a tour by the director Madeleine Montpelier (Wendy Crewson) - Fiona recalls a recent lovely memory while confessing to wishing she could forget some sordid things from more than 20 years ago (Grant's infidelities with several female students), yet appreciative that unlike some of his colleagues he never left her and now he's not abandoning her: "I'm going, but I'm not gone."

The gooey plaques crowd neurons in the brain … synapses dissolve away, the medical texts explain, like a large house in which circuit breakers snap off one by one until the lights are completely gone. "All we can aspire to is a little bit of grace," says Fiona.

For the first 30 days, when she's "settling in," Grant is prohibited from seeing her. On his initial visit after her settling in, he sees her with Aubrey (Michael Murphey), a silent man in a wheelchair, to whom she's become deeply attached, helping him play cards and taking him on walks; she speaks pleasantly to Grant as if he were a new admit. Nurse Kristy (Kristen Thomson) counsels Grant not to take it personally, only day by day, that "things change, back and forth."

In his coming to see her frequently, bringing her books about Iceland (a place she had longed to see but chose not to), the land of her forgotten heritage, sometimes reading to her from them, she remarks to Grant: "You are persistent, aren't you?" Grant can't help but wonder, though, if she may be acting out a charade as punishment. "I never wanted to be away from her," he says to Kristy, whose prescience knows otherwise, replying matter-of-factly that he was "not always the doggedly devoted husband."

About Aubrey, Fiona cryptically says to Grant: "He doesn't confuse me." Then Aubrey leaves Meadowlake, devastating Fiona, who becomes severely depressed. "They've got short memories," says the efficiently encouraging Madeleine to Grant, "and that's not always bad."

Grant takes her back to their home of the past 20 years in hopes of helping her remember him from familiar surroundings, but she enigmatically remarks, "Everything reminds me of him," before asking to be taken back "home."

After Fiona's continued unwillingness to socialize or get exercise, Grant - a realistic pragmatist, willing to do whatever's necessary to prevent her being moved to the second floor ("for people who've really lost it") - pays Marian Burke (Olympia Dukakis), Aubrey's wife, a visit, asking her to send her husband back to Meadowlake. Unlike Grant's nearly idyllic life, Marian's has been harsh with financial hardship; she says that she cannot afford both her house payments and the cost of a nursing home for Aubrey.

People are either angry at things not being the way they want them to be, expostulates Marian philosophically, or they are accepting of reality. Though Grant knows that for Fiona it will never get better, it will only get worse, he refuses to let her go.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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