Last night, my wife and I got around to seeing the acclaimed Away from Her, featuring sure-to-be-Oscar-nominated Julie Christie as a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s. Her husband is then forced to watch as she forms a loving bond with a male patient at her nursing home, and must find a way to reunite his wife with the object of her love when his rival is removed from the home. It features many images of snow, always a sign of deep meaning, as is the fact that the husband reads to his wife from W.H. Auden. There is a plaintive and whispery soundtrack. The writer and director is a very sensitive actress named Sarah Polley, who has made a habit of staring balefully into the camera to express her pain and anguish. Scene after scene in Away from Her features the husband receiving one body blow or another from his wife’s declining perceptual abilities. And not just his; at one point a fellow patient with Alzheimer’s forgets how to use sign language with her daughter, and she was the only person in the family who bothered to learn sign language, so now the daughter no longer has anyone to talk with. As my wife wept and sobbed and sobbed and wept, I found myself getting strangely angry. “Don’t worry,” I said after yet another agonizing moment. “In the next scene, the actors actually will reach through the screen and pull our toenails out one by one.” So if you want to see a film that tries very hard to depress you, I strongly recommend Away From Her. As for me, I just wanted to get Away From Her.