LIFE'S PAINFUL TRUTH, PERFECTLY PERFORMED.

Byline: Bob Strauss

Film Critic

Some worry that "Away From Her's" ostensible subject, a long-married couple coping with the wife's Alzheimer's disease, will scare off audiences.

Perhaps it will. But they'll be missing the greatest, most thoughtful movie about love since "Brokeback Mountain."

This is no hand-wringing dementia melodrama -- although, like it is about everything, the movie is honest and clear-eyed on that matter. "Away From Her" is so beautifully, delicately and completely about relationships, their strengths and weaknesses and unavoidable changes, that the illness aspects of the story, key as they are, play secondary roles.

Starring a never-better Julie Christie and Canada's beloved Gordon Pinsent, it's an immensely moving twilight waltz that is practically pure emotion -- but set forth, mostly, in a measured, matter-

of-fact way that enhances the perception of what's being felt. There's a wintry stillness to the film -- it was shot in rural Ontario, Canada -- that is both harsh and reassuring, like learning how deeply you really love someone as you realize that you're losing them.

Two of Canada's other signature talents created this sad, wonderful, subtly glowing object. Young actress Sarah Polley directed and adapted veteran short-story writer Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." While Polley inevitably adds new material and shifts some emphasis (Munro was much more focused on the husband's past infidelities), she's remarkably in tune with the very mature, motivationally complicated world the original author painstakingly built.

There are a handful of false notes, dialogue-wise and with a bit of behavior near the movie's touching climax. But they barely mean a thing when you have actors as capable as Pinsent and Christie, who can make a line like "There's something delicious about oblivion" sound natural.

Fiona and Grant, childless and together nearly 50 years, have lived for some time in her family's lakeside cabin. Since, in fact, he retired from his university job -- which he did mainly to get away from the female students it was so easy to seduce, and remain exclusively with the only woman he ever really loved.

But now Fiona is storing frying pans in the freezer and getting lost on her cross-country ski outings. It's she who insists on institutionalization over Grant's deep misgivings. The facility she goes to, Meadowlake, is modern and as pleasant as such a home can be.

But it has a rule: no outside visitors for the first 30 days. Despite his affairs, Grant has never been separated from Fiona for so long. He doesn't know what to expect on his first visit, but certainly has no inkling of what he actually finds. Fiona, though cheery and as charming as ever, has essentially forgotten who her husband is. Far more traumatic than that, though, she's fallen in love with the nearly catatonic Aubrey (Michael Murphy), whose wife Marian (Olympia Dukakis) parked him at Meadowlake while she took a much-needed vacation.

The genius of Christie's performance lies in how she always knows just the right amount of wisdom to convey through Fiona's eyes, face and the way she pronounces her words.

Grant is so naturally shell-

shocked by what happens that he often appears to be the one who's losing his mind. Sure, guilt, abandonment and the depth of that love mentioned earlier are all tying this guy in knots, but what about that other side of him? Can this gentle old guy use his wiles to get Fiona back? Or help her in the most selfless way? Or would the same scheme that enters his desperate mind just be selfish and manipulative?

Munro's story, precise as it is, is open to many interpretations, depending on the emotional experiences and temperament of the reader.

So, too, the magnificently sensitive "Away From Her" bathes viewers in the specifics of a great, rich love story, but knows better than to instruct us on what love really is ... or who people really are, whether we think we recognize them or not.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

[e-mail]

AWAY FROM HER - Three and one half stars

(PG-13: sex, language)

Starring: Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis, Michael Murphy, Kristen Thomson, Wendy Crewson.

Director: Sarah Polley.

Running time: 1 hr. 50 min.

Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood; Laemmly Monica, Santa Monica.

In a nutshell: We're unlikely to see better acting this year than Christie's performance as a woman slipping into Alzheimer's dementia and Pinsent's as the almost equally bewildered husband who is losing her in more ways than one.

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