DVD REVIEW: Away From Her (2007)

LOVE, LONGING AND LETTING GO

Just over halfway through young Canadian actor Sarah Polley's directorial debut Away From Her, Grant (Gordon Pinsent), a retired college professor is at a sanitarium watching a resident called Fiona (Julie Christie) getting casually intimate with another wheelchair-bound inmate, Aubrey (Michael Murphy). A gum-chewing teenager with shocks of purple in her hair, loud music blaring out of her earphones, and obviously bored with the place, is sitting next to him, and asks (a little sharply) what he's doing watching a woman sharing a personal moment with her husband. To which, with unmistakable irony and sadness in his eyes, Grant says matter-of-factly, "I'm her husband."

He's just learning the hardest lesson about love -- letting go.