WHILE ADAPTING NOVELS FOR THE SCREEN usually requires major excisions from the source material, the process of turning a short story into a feature film is drastically different-often demanding the addition of characters and plotlines. (Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana's successful expansion of E. Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" is one recent example.) Rare is the short-story adaptation that both hews close to the source and works as a genuinely cinematic creation. So Canadian actress-director Sarah Polley's Away from Her, a film version of Alice Munro's 1999 story "The Bear Came over the Mountain," feels a little like a magic act or, at the very least, a keen optical illusion: Somehow, Polley's austere, haunting 110-minute film sticks very close to Munro's forty-six-page tale, with, one senses, very little filler.
Away from Her tells the story of an elderly married couple in rural Canada, Fiona (Julie Christie) and Grant (Gordon Pinsent), whose nearly fifty-year marriage gets put to the test when Fiona, stricken with Alzheimer's disease, chooses to enter the nearby Meadowlake retirement home. There, she quickly strikes up an amorous relationship with a fellow patient, Aubrey (Michael Murphy), whom she thinks she knew when they were young. Soon, the memory of her husband slips away. Although the melancholy and patient Grant constantly visits, to her he becomes merely a curious, polite fellow who comes and brings books-or, in Munro's words, "some persistent visitor who took a special interest in her." Through Grant's heartbreaking visits to Meadowlake, we learn slowly of this couple's history-their turbulent early years and their happier later ones. As Fiona's memory fades further, the story of their life together sheds more and more layers, coming into sharper relief.
"I wasn't really thinking of adapting someone else's work into a film," Policy says, noting that she first read the story in 2001, on a flight back from Iceland, where she had just finished shooting Hal Hartley's No Such Thing, which also features Christie. "On the one hand, I thought it would be the worst thing in the world to wreck a story so beautiful. But at the same time, I couldn't stop seeing Julie Christie's face when I thought of the story. The cinematic images kept growing in my head." The particular fortune of having read the story on that trip (Fiona is of Icelandic descent) did not escape her, either.
Polley initially feared adapting one of Munro's stories because of the writer's iconic status, especially in their native Canada, and the seeming perfection of her prose. Noting that she was constantly rewriting her script, despite there being only about eight months' time between the first draft and the beginning of production, the twenty-eight-year-old admits to having had a tough time at first with how best to maintain the tone of Munro's work while also making the film her own: "The trickiest part of writing the script was to find a way to put [Munro's] voice into it," she says. "I knew it had to be there. But I didn't know how much or how little."
Polley experimented with turning Munro's narration into dialogue, planning to use it as a guide and assuming that it would eventually have to be rewritten. However, "at every read-through of the script," she recalls, "I would be planning on taking it out, but the actors kept making it work as real dialogue." The translation of Munro's narration into speech proves seamless and effective. Here is Munro, writing about Grant's dalliance with adultery early in his career, and his decision to give it up:
He had never stopped making love to Fiona in spite of disturbing demands elsewhere. He had not stayed away from her for a single night.... There were no more hectic flirtations. No bare female toes creeping up under a man's pants leg at a dinner party. No more loose wives.
And here is Fiona, in the film, recalling this long-past period of marital turmoil:
You never left me. You still made love to me, despite disturbing demands elsewhere. But all those sandals, Grant. All those bare female toes.... All those pretty girls.
The actual dialogue from Munro's story also proved remarkably resilient. In one particularly powerful scene, Munro's words, as spoken by her characters, are carried over almost completely intact. Grant first visits his wife in the retirement home, after a mandated thirty-day waiting period, and slowly realizes she doesn't recognize him despite dieir pleasant conversation. Fiona greets him by describing the bridge game she and the others are playing:
FIONA: Bridge. Deadly serious. Quite rabid about it. I can remember being like that in college for a while. My friends and I would cut class and smoke and play like cutthroats. One's name was Phoebe. I don't remember the others.
GRANT: Phoebe Hart.
FIONA: You knew her, too?
There is virtually no difference between the dialogue and Munro's.
Such scrupulous fidelity to source material could have resulted in a somewhat academic film, akin to the dramatizations of short stories screened in high school classrooms. Polley's gambit works because, beneath it all, she has in fact made subtle changes that give the film its own unique structure.
While the story follows a mostly linear course, with occasional, brief reminiscences of Grant and Fiona's earlier years, the film opens with a glimpse of Grant driving by himself. We eventually find out that he's on his way to the home of Aubrey's wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis), with a request: Marian has withdrawn Aubrey from the retirement home after learning of his relationship with Fiona, which has sent Fiona into a downward spiral. Grant has come to request that Marian allow Aubrey to visit the home, to see whether it helps Fiona get better. The incident is featured toward the end of Munro's work, but Polley opts to use the Marian story line as a framing device for the film's narrative.
One senses here, perhaps, the influence of Atom Egoyan, who directed Polley in his seminal films Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter and whom she calls "a father figure." (He is also credited as executive producer on the film.) Furthermore, the slight sense of dislocation this nonlinear approach initially lends the film mirrors Fiona's disassociation at the onset of her illness. There's another change here: Near the close of Munro's story, Grant wonders what it might be like to seduce Marian. In Polley's film, the two actually strike up a brief affair.
But perhaps the change that serves Policy best is her realization of the retirement home's milieu. In Munro's story, aside from Grant's friendship with one of the workers, Meadowlake is a spectral, menacing presence: Grant recalls that before a recent overhaul, the home was a "dim, lowceilinged" affair smelling of bleach and urine. Polley, however, had to travel through a number of retirement homes near the end of her own grandmother's life and found herself writing some of the residents of her grandmother's homes into her script. Meadowlake, in Away from Her, feels painfully real-the kind of place where the staff's pleasant and respectful demeanor toward patients only betrays the fact that they have had to perform these same tasks, these same courtesies, countless times.
While these changes lend the film its own atmosphere and rhythm, the emotional through-line of Polley's film, right down to its final utterance ("Forsaken"), still comes straight from Munro's story. So it is rather surprising to hear that, despite such fidelity, Munro herself was not involved in the production-indeed, Polley notes, the somewhat reclusive writer hasn't seen the film. "I would have loved to have her involved in the process," the director says. "At first, I didn't even know if she would read the script, and at one point, I felt I couldn't go through without having some idea of what she thought." Just before production began, though, Polley did finally get her call: Munro left a message for her, saying she had read the script and liked it. "And then," Polley says, "I never heard from her again."
[Sidebar]
THE MOVIEGOER
BILGE EBIRI
[Sidebar]
It is rather surprising to hear that, despite such fidelity, Alice Munro herself was not involved in the production-indeed, Polley notes, the somewhat reclusive writer hasn't seen the film.
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