I try to see current movies featuring old actors whenever the actors are famous for their art, or the writing and direction promise to offer us real news about later life. Sometimes\u2014often\u2014I am disappointed. Producers choose sentimental, implausible or burlesque scripts; old actors accept the roles because there are so few available. But since 2006, stellar cinematic culture is suddenly waking us to the deep, universal themes of illness in the context of lifelong marriages. I am thinking of four absorbing films.<\/p>\n
Away From Her<\/i> (2006) stars Julie Christie, regal at 70, as a wife with Alzheimer\u2019s who falls in love with another man in her nursing home. Unfinished Song<\/i> (2011) provides Vanessa Redgrave in her late 70s with an unmannered role as a chipper, loving wife, dying of cancer, and casts the austerely beautiful Terence Stamp as her dour helpmate. Amour<\/i> (2012) features Emmanuelle Riva as the 80-year-old wife who suffers two strokes and Jean-Louis Trintignant as the too-long-suffering husband who eventually smothers her. And Still Mine<\/i> (2013) offers the charming Genevieve Bujold as a wife slowly losing memories but not yet much selfhood or rationality. <\/p>\n
Of these four, in my opinion, Still Mine<\/i> is the movie that lovers and caregivers have equally been waiting for. It offers the most imaginatively productive balance between challenges and resiliencies, between sad realities and butt-headed optimism. Before Irene Morrison (played by Genevieve Bujold) falls and breaks a hip, her husband, Craig (James Cromwell), has already acknowledged that they cannot stay in their two-story house. His desire for them to age in place together drives the plot: his designing and building a smaller house for the two of them, on one floor, with a better view. He has ample skills and strength to construct this himself, starting with cutting down his own old-growth, hardwood timber and sawing his own lumber. <\/p>\n
This part is based on a true story about an 85-year-old man in New Brunswick (Canada) who did just that. It wasn\u2019t only that the Morrisons were unwilling to abandon their land; Craig would do anything not to lose Irene to the care of strangers. His boulder-like determination, against the rigidity of the town\u2019s building inspector and their altered health circumstances, is as heroic an aspect of his character as his motive\u2014to care for Irene himself because he knows better than anyone else how to do it. Loving faithfulness can survive even the terror of forgetfulness. <\/p>\n
This Best Picture in the Canada Screen Awards of 2013 constitutes the true love story that many viewers desperately wanted Michael Haneke\u2019s Amour<\/i> to be. Indeed, Still Mine<\/i> is an antidote to Amour<\/i>. Unlike Still Mine<\/i>, there is no sex in Amour<\/i>. But neither is there much conversation. Early on, Anne and Georges appear in a long shot, conversing with some animation while returning from a concert. But we don\u2019t hear what they say. We never do hear them having a normal, marital conversation, which is the foundation of any good, long-term marriage. After Anne\u2019s strokes, Amour<\/i> is all emergency speech between them. And remote shocked eyes: Trintignant\u2019s fixed look of stoic readiness for further horror. And he inflicts horrors\u2014on her and on himself. <\/p>\n
Still Mine<\/i> is another genre, of course, a kind of heroic romance\u2013partly because it ends before Irene\u2019s state worsens, partly because Craig\u2019s character determines the resilient tone. Stubborn, unfearful. His steadiness, flexibility and attentiveness, firmed by that long marriage and 85 years of other life experience, reassure us as they do his wife. The dialogue, the heart of this marriage, continues despite the fact that she is becoming cognitively impaired. <\/p>\n
Still Mine<\/i> doesn\u2019t name her condition\u2014no doctor speaks. Instead, it relieves us of the medical model. It doesn\u2019t linger on instances that demonstrate her decline. Only once is Craig flummoxed by her strangeness, when Irene seems to collapse on the frigid lawn and wants to sleep there. Craig is the most patient of husbands but he can\u2019t let that occur, especially if she has just had a mini-stroke. He decides to haul her inside bodily. It is the one time he overrides her autonomy in the entire, two-year period the film covers. He apologizes later.<\/p>\n
Unlike the solitary couple in Michael Haneke\u2019s Amour<\/i>, Irene and Craig maintain a life despite her cognitive impairment. They see friends, have concerned children; a neighbor brings covered dishes. After a lifetime of independence, Craig will accept paid aides to help him help her. It never crossed the mind of Michael McGowan, the man who brilliantly wrote and directed this magnanimous film, that this man would consider his wife a burden and be driven to end her life. <\/p>\n
Irene admits fearing that she might forget \u201ceverything,\u201d by which she means Craig. But he promises her that it won\u2019t matter. The best answer I know of at such a moment is, \u201cBut I will remember you<\/i>.\u201d There are at least two handles by which to pick up a bad situation, which cognitive impairment can sometimes create. And the desperate one–shown in Amour\u2014<\/i>however plausibly motivated by frustrated love, pity and fatigue, may destroy everyone.<\/p>\n
All four of the films I listed (these two, Unfinished Song<\/i>, and Away from Her<\/i>) concern long-enduring relationships that face strain. As such, they are fascinating landmarks for other filmmakers and critics and repay being thought of together. But I have a complaint as a film addict and age critic about something odd that the four have in common. The victim is always the woman, never the man. This is peculiar for films that claim any degree of realism. Men sicken and die earlier than women. Typically, it is women who serve as caregivers. These are male fantasies of health and immunity. <\/span><\/p>\n So a plea to authors and directors: when will you make the howl of grief from behind a closed door come from a widow<\/i> rather than from Terence Stamp (Unfinished Song<\/i>) as a widower? When will we see a bereft woman reach out a hand in bed (as Craig Morrison does when Irene is away in rehab) toward the empty space her husband had warmly filled? When will you give us a film in which the wife is the patient, or even the not-so-patient, caregiver? When will an old woman perform epic feats to keep at her side the old man she has lovingly aged with? <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a9 2013 Margaret Morganroth Gullette<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I try to see current movies featuring old actors whenever the actors are famous for their art, or the writing and direction promise to offer us real news about later life. Sometimes\u2014often\u2014I am disappointed. Producers choose sentimental, implausible or burlesque…<\/span><\/p>\n