Polley blossomed into a pretty, blue-eyed blonde whose ethereal, slightly off-kilter face got her repeatedly cast as someone to whom bad things happen, beginning with her haunting turn as the paralyzed victim of a school bus accident (with some sexual abuse thrown in) in Atom Egoyan's 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter. That role got her noticed in this country, where Polley has appeared in a handful of studio movies, notably Doug Liman's Go and Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead. But you can't sustain yourself as Hollywood's Next Big Thing by pulling out of Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous (in which she was to play Penny Lane) in order to star in a low-budget Canadian feature, The Law of Enclosures, which tanked on arrival. Not a sterling career move, but an irresistible fuck-you from someone who, when other actresses her age were busy with retail therapy, was out on the streets of Toronto, protesting on behalf of the homeless. Polley likes to be in movies she'd pay money to see, which means that she has built her résumé around brainy independent directors like Egoyan, David Cronenberg (eXistenZ), Wim Wenders (Don't Come Knocking) and the Spanish director Isabel Coixet, for whom she has played a young mother with months left to live (My Life Without Me) and a scarred survivor of the Balkan Wars (The Secret Life of Words).
There's nothing remotely pugnacious, ethereal, or wounded about the poised, cheerful young woman who shows up at a West Hollywood hotel to talk about Away From Her, her assured first feature as a director, which she also adapted from a short story by Canadian writer Alice Munro. Polley had read Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," a desolate yet oddly uplifting tale about an older couple whose long marriage is called into question by the wife's slow succumbing to Alzheimer's disease, in The New Yorker shortly after co-starring with Julie Christie in Hal Hartley's No Such Thing.
"When I picked up this story I couldn't stop seeing Julie's face," says Polley. It was a long slog to get Christie — who's as blithely indifferent to her celebrity as Polley is to hers — to commit. But Polley ground her down, and the result is a transcendently quicksilver rendition of a woman who, as her character ruefully says in the movie, is "beginning to disappear" but will brook no pity.
Polley, who after a tumultuous early love life is now contentedly married to Toronto-based film editor David Wharnsby, has a precociously mature understanding of Munro's austere, inward, yet intensely physical account of this enduring but troubled union. "I don't think there can be a simple love story when two people know each other for that long," she says. "The relationship is full of failures and heartbreak and betrayal and moments of redemption. This was uncharted territory for me, but it felt so obviously cinematic."
Polley is matter of fact about writing an adaptation for the first time. "These characters were so finely nuanced that it didn't feel like a big job to figure out how to adapt it," she says. "I wanted to remain as close to the story as possible." She succeeded well enough that, after reading the script, the publicity-shy Munro gave her blessing to the project in a warm message on Polley's voicemail.
Away From Her has been getting rapturous advance notices in North America, but it's the Canadian reviews Polley is nervous about, because that's where her funding comes from, and she is already hard at work pursuing the rights to Alias Grace, a novel by Margaret Atwood. Polley wants to maintain a dual career but says that acting was of little help once she settled into the director's chair. "Everything I learned about filmmaking," she says, "was not from being an actor but from making my five shorts." Polley has a couple of acting projects coming up, but finds herself far more open to a Hollywood offer to direct. "It's funny how much more tempting that is as a director than as an actor. I feel as though I've been so immune to Hollywood as an actor, but if I was offered a great film to direct and a decent budget it would be hard to say no. Especially after having gone through four or five years trying to get movies made."
Certainly, it never occurred to her to direct herself in Away From Her. "You want people to fall in love with the actors," she says, "and I don't think I could fall in love with myself." If that makes her the right person in the wrong town, so be it.
