THE tale of a superhero, a '70s drug dealer, or a plot to destroy the world it's not.
Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," which isn't really about a bear and does not feature a mountain, is the story of an elderly couple -- a once-rakish professor of Nordic literature and his free-spirited, bohemian wife, who is slowly losing her mind.
Most of its low-key plot takes place amid the Ontario snow and inside an unglamorous retirement home. Some of the sharpest revelations come from lost opportunities and things never quite said.
This is not, in other words, the kind of "property" that makes a natural movie.
In fact, one of the people who never imagined it on the screen is the author herself.
"I don't think my stories lend themselves particularly well," Munro, who lives in a small town in southwest Ontario and rarely grants interviews, said by phone this week. "I'm not that keen on literature into film. It's very difficult to translate things."
But the actress Sarah Polley saw things otherwise. The result is "Away From Her," which Polley wrote and directed.
"It seemed so obviously cinematic to me," said Polley, who first read the story in the New Yorker magazine while flying back to Toronto from a film shoot. "The characters were so finely nuanced, the dialogue was so strong, and visually it had such strong imagery," she said over lunch in Hollywood. "In fact it was one of the rare cases where I thought it was important that the film stay faithful to the original source material."
The issue of putting a potentially difficult film across to an audience didn't much concern her. "I didn't think too much about audience at any point in making the film," said Polley, a major star in her native Canada and probably best known in this country for her performances in Atom Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter" and Doug Liman's "Go." "And I feel that most of my favorite films don't get made thinking about an audience." She's talking, for instance about Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage," which she calls her favorite film for its ability to capture "the rawness of what it means for two people to know each other so well."
"For me the whole idea of adapting this story I loved so much was the idea of finding a way to express the impact it had on me -- my experience alone and in solitude," said Polley, a shy but engaging 28-year-old in a herringbone jacket and jeans who lights up at mention of her favorite writers or Toronto bands. "What was important was that the film had an integrity and had a rhythm and purpose the way the story did without being manipulative."
