Opinion: Away from Her
I just watched Away from Her, a movie about an old couple where the wife has Alzheimer’s disease and the husband has to cope with her slipping away from him as she begins to forget things and eventually who he is. It was decent, but not a lot more. The whole time I was just aching for it to be somehow more beautiful, by which I mean I thought about The Place Promised in Our Early Days while I was watching Away from Her and wished Away from Her could be even half as beautiful as the representation of separation in that film.
Admittedly, The Place Promised in Our Early Days does have the advantage of being about young people, immediately making it easier for me to relate to its characters. But then relationships, as anyone who has ever read any of my work, are something I’m very much interested in fiction, and the sort of degeneration of the wife in Away from Her is something of which I have comparable first-hand experience.
To the film’s credit, as far as I know, it did represent the effects of Alzheimer’s accurately. Unfortunately, while it got that down, the characterisation of the supporting cast particularly was a little off, with an over-bearing bureaucratic managing nurse type seeming particularly two-dimensional and cliche. The dialogue too often felt a little off, unnaturalistic, as if the writer wanted certain lines to be in the script because they sounded good, regardless of whether they fitted.
Now this is something I imagine, at least from my own experience, all writers do: They think of a really great line or a short exchange and go “yeah, I’ve got to write that into something.” And with more amateur writers you can tell when they’ve done that, while with the really good writers, they still do that, but their lines blend in so well you don’t spot that they were just trying to get to that one line all along. I’m trying to think examples of this, but all I can think of right now is Quentin Tarantino. He, I suspect, does this for every line; he just sits there thinking up great lines and jamming them all together, like “Like a Virgin is about a fuck machine” followed by ten minutes of snappy dialogue about why that’s the case. Of course, making films that are just the ‘great lines’ you thought of doesn’t leave a great deal of room for plot.
Not that I’m talking about Tarantino; I’m talking about Away from Her. I had a couple of problems with one of the main secondary characters, the kind of nurse who worked as a nurse, rather than the manager one. She’s all nice and friendly to the husband for most of the film, but in one scene she suddenly turns on him, and I suppose it’s to reveal some extra back-story and a hitherto unseen aspect of her character, but really it just came across as jarring. The other problem I had with her was that she seemed to have an awful lot of free time to just sit and chat with the husband when, as far as I noticed, there were only about two other staff working the whole care home. Now, I don’t know what healthcare is like in Canada (Michael Moore says it’s good, but I think he’s biased), but my mother’s a matron in an English nursing home and she’s lucky if she gets five minutes for lunch, let alone sitting and chatting with the visitors.
And apart from that, there were a few other contrivances in the film, like at one point the husband asks the manager woman for the home address of another visitor and she just gives it to him. I’m no expert on the policies of Canadian nursing homes, but I’m pretty sure that it’s bad practice to hand out the address of patient’s or their relatives willy-nilly.
I could forgive the film these small inconsistencies; I graciously forgave Makoto Shinkai for his wilder flights of fancy in Place and Voices (admittedly after a short burst of characteristically pedantic ranting), but there still seems to be something lacking. Another, even more comparable, story I wanted Away from Her to ascend to was the plot line that runs through Once Upon a Time in America, wherein the main character, Noodles, knows this girl his whole life, fancies her since she’s a kid, always loves her, even through the violence and the drugs and the other women, and she always kind of loves him, even after he takes her on their one date before she flies to New York or Hollywood to become a star and he rapes her in the car on the way home; but they can never be together because she says that she knows if she was with him he would lock her up in cage when she wanted to be free, and he said he would (not literally, obviously). Now that’s not even the main plotline in Once Upon a Time in America, yet it still held far more resonance with me than Away from Her.
Now, before I end this opinion, two more items: First, old people in films: they always look so idealised and unrealistic. Real old people, especially in nursing homes, aren’t all bright and cheery and running around on zimmer-frames spouting poignant life-affirming advice to anyone who wanders in with a problem: most of the time they just sleep and dribble a bit, or stare blankly at walls. This always strikes me in films and TV shows as particularly artificial, but then, thinking about it, almost everyone is idealised on screen, what with all the make-up. Real people don’t look like TV-people.
The other minor issue I had with Away from Her was too much old people sex. Admittedly it only showed the afterwards, but you still new what they had done, and that’s just wrong: no one over the age of forty has sex, despite what the internet says.
Tags: Alheimer's Disease, Away from Her, Canada, Makoto Shinkai, Michael Moore, Old People, Once Upon a Time in America, Quentin Tarantino, Relationships, The Place Promised in Our Early Days
