Away from Her http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00tkxhk/Away_from_Her/

Away from Her (2006) on BBC iPlayer, written and directed by Sarah Polley, based on the short story by Alice Munro ‘The Bear Came over the Mountain’.

As a writing exercise we were once asked to think about adapting a short story into a potential script. I chose a little known Turgnev story as a jumping off point. You could say if it was a currant bun it still had half of a currant in it. Polley keeps most of the currants and most of the bun. She reorders, rather than changes and music carries much of the load-bearing tone. Munro, of course, gets inside people’s heads. She can tell the reader what Grant (Gordon Pinsent) is thinking when, for example, when his wife of forty- four years, Fiona (Julia Christie) mistakes him for a fellow resident in Meadowlake Retirement Home. She has Alzheimer’s. The first stages of forgetfulness are tenderly shown, but in a Munro like twist, it is her rather than him, that pushes for her incarceration. He never wants to be Away from Her and spends long hours as a visitor to Meadowlake. He watches Fiona seamlessly taken up with and tenderly caring for  another inmate Aubrey (Michael Murphy). He is equally as tender and forgiving. There is some hoo-haw and an unnecessary flashback to an affair Grant had thirty-years before when teaching college, which is part of Munro’s story. But it's smoothed over.  Meadowlake has a darker side. When Aubrey leaves for home, Fiona in a sense also leaves.  It’s the threat of movement to the second floor and its playing out of a vegetative state and end days that compels Grant to contact Aubrey’s wife Marian (Olympia Dukakis). This is a splendid jousting match. ‘It’s bad luck,’ he says, of her situation. She shrugs, ‘It’s just life. You can’t beat life’.  Later, she tells him she knows what he’s doing, but ask him to at least pretend that he cares for her. Bittersweet as Munro.