The I Inside
July 9th, 2007
The only excuse I have for sitting through this straight-to-DVD clunker is the presence of Sarah Polley, who Marcy will see in absolutely anything. Ryan Phillippe, Piper Perabo and Stephen Rea are in it too, so how bad could it be?
Bad enough for the credits to misspell the star’s name: after an accident that left him dead for two minutes, Simon Cable (Ryan Phillipe [sic]) wakes up in a hospital with a case of that lazy old mindfuck standby, amnesia. He finds out that he’s got a wife who doesn’t love him (Perabo) and a lover who seems to (Polley) — but then things change again, because like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, he’s become unstuck in time, too.
The script, based on a play by Michael Cooney, dispenses the pieces of the puzzle at random, and it takes all of five minutes to suspect that it’s going to end like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Still, we were willing to go along with it, but I’m here to report that while The I Inside just barely held our attention, it utterly failed to repay it. Which is a polite way of saying that it features the lamest WTF ending I’ve seen in a while. Avoid.
The I Inside. Roland Suso Richter, 2003. *
Away From Her
March 15th, 2007
Sarah Polley’s first feature, an adaptation of an Alice Munro short story about a couple dealing with Alzheimer’s, is getting a lot of praise on the festival circuit, and she was appropriately celebrated at the premiere for MoMA’s Canadian Front program last night.
Julie Christie plays a woman in her sixties who finds herself putting pans into the freezer, and before you know it, her husband of 44 years (Gordon Pinsent) has to drive her to a home — where she soon forgets all about him and begins a touching/infuriating relationship with another patient instead. It’s well acted, of course, but the dialogue is a tad too “literary” for my taste, and Polley’s direction left me somewhat confused in the end. Still, it’s a story that rarely gets told–when was a last time you saw a tour of a nursing home as act-ending set piece? It’s goes without saying that it’s all terribly sad, even though there are a few flashes of humor. In a way, this is a movie not quite unlike Severance: Away From Her can be just as hard to take, and you really have to be in the mood for it. At the Q&A with Polley and Olympia Dukakis, it was nice to see that Polley can, in fact, smile.
Away from Her. Sarah Polley, 2006. ***
- Official site with trailer
- Wikipedia
- Away from Her on Rotten Tomatoes
- Away from Her on GreenCine: Sundance
- The Reeler has photos and quotes from last night’s screening
- Reverse Shot loved it
- YouTube Bonus:
