Anya and I went to see Away From Her last night. The film is based on an Alice Munro short story, and it’s a lovely, exquisitely restrained piece of work. The (distractingly) beautiful Julie Christie plays Fiona, a firm, witty, passionately self-aware woman with Alzheimer’s who leaves her husband of 44 years to check into a nursing home so that she can, as she puts it, begin to disappear with “a little bit of grace.” Grant and Fiona have one of those lifetime loves that seems as weathered and as everlasting as an old tree, a sort of Calvin-and-Alice-Trilling affection grown out of decades of caustic and kind words, fury and fondness; the kind of marriage that makes you feel sort of in awe, not because it’s perfect (there’s a dark offense in Grant’s past that whispers itself into the pair’s parting moments) but because it’s so sturdy and scarred it begins to resemble an element of the landscape: a mountain, an ancient sea. (Watching it, you look at your slight, flimsy two years of marriage and quiver in fear and concern: what if you never get there? What if you do? What happens at the end?) Some time after Fiona moves into the home, and some time after she forgets enough of herself to do so, she falls in love with and begins tending faithfully to Aubrey, a frail fellow patient who depends on her with a silent, almost frightening need. Grant—watching—has to decide how to respond to this, and in doing so he becomes the focal point for the film’s treatment of love through the lens of loss, memory, and suffering. What he ends up doing is in some sense deeply romantic, and at the same time it’s an extraordinarily pragmatic gesture: a fractured compromise with the present in order to retain the right to preserve the past as it was.

Go see it. You’ll like it. I promise. Especially if we usually disagree.