Dementia on the Silver Screen

Over the last decade, the subject of dementia has been explored across a range of generically and thematically diverse mainstream English-language films. That filmmakers have been prepared to engage with such challenging subject matter is arguably at least in part a reflection of the rise in global diagnosis rates and the growing public awareness around dementia. Several films have touched briefly on the subject through the development of minor characters or plotlines including Hanging Up (Keaton, 2000), It Runs in the Family (Schepisi, 2003), The Good Life (Berra, 2007), and Win Win (McCarthy, 2011). Some of these present perfunctory, ill-informed, or unhelpfully nihilistic representations of the disease; some conflate all forms of dementia with Alzheimer’s or oversimplify symptoms and treatment. Others, including Friends with Benefits (Gluck, 2011) and The Descendants (Payne, 2011), offer a necessarily succinct but surprisingly sensitive treatment of dementia-related issues in a few short but compelling scenes. In both films, young men react to older characters with dementia in unconventional but not unsympathetic ways, prompting other characters and viewers alike to question their own responses. Films that have dealt more substantially with dementia over the last decade fall predominantly into the categories of drama (The Notebook [Cassavetes, 2004], Aurora Borealis [Burke, 2005], and The Savages [Jenkins, 2007]) and comedy (the unsettlingly dark Happy Tears [Lichtenstein, 2009] and the equally discomfiting Barney’s Version [Lewis, 2010]). However, rather than constituting the primary focus, the person with dementia and its ramifications functions as a catalyst in these films, triggering events and consequences for other characters. Youthful romance underpins The Notebook and Aurora Borealis, whereas the onset of dementia in a parent casts dysfunctional sibling relationships into high relief in The Savages and Happy Tears. Unlike all these films, within the burgeoning subgenre of dementia-related scenarios, there are several prominent examples where the character with dementia is situated firmly in center stage. Iris (Eyre, 2001) and Away From Her (Polley, 2006) deal thoughtfully with a charismatic central female character, and the physical, emotional, and psychological complexities that accompany the progression of her dementia symptoms. In Richard Eyre’s biopic of the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, the dual narrative structure contrasts her life as an iconoclastic young woman with her latter years, prior to and following her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Given her verbal acuity and fierce commitment to “the life of the mind,” the film’s emotional pull lies in the particularly cruel irony of Murdoch’s intellectual decline. Writer/director Sarah Polley’s assured and visually striking debut feature Away From Her details one woman’s struggle to come to terms with her dementia diagnosis. Following admission to residential care, the woman’s growing emotional attachment to a fellow resident and rapid cognitive deterioration thereafter provokes long-standing tensions in the marriage that her husband spends most of the latter half of the film attempting to reconcile. Both films adopt a nonlinear narrative approach, with constant, almost willful temporal shifts suggestive of memory itself, in all its inherent fluidity and selectivity. And while dealing in considerable, and occasionally confronting, detail with some of the realities of advanced dementia, the constraints of a feature-length film result in the disease trajectory being unrealistically condensed. Equally significantly, although both films nominally focus on their central female characters, the dominant point of view in each is ultimately that of the spouse. A more recent work, The Iron Lady (Lloyd, 2011), is exceptional for its unequivocal first- person focus. Like Iris, this film explores the life of a maverick British female figure. It begins with a seemingly unremarkable scene; an elderly woman purchases milk from an inner London corner shop and returns home to have breakfast with her husband. Yet this opening scene in Phyllida Lloyd’s inspired biopic of Britain’s only female prime minister is in fact memorable in several respects. The elderly woman in question is Maggie Thatcher—played with typical conviction by Meryl Streep—and from the outset, events are presented consistently from Thatcher’s point of view. Although this is hardly surprising, given the centrality of Thatcher’s character to the narrative, what is significant is the choice to present her as an older character clearly suffering from symptoms of dementia. Abi Morgan’s screenplay devotes a significant proportion of the film’s 105min running time to the elderly Thatcher, whose failing short-term memory but vivid long-term recall triggers a series of flashbacks that flesh out the details of the younger Thatcher’s rise through the political ranks. But rather than simply rely on straightforward shifts between past and present, Lloyd’s film engages, in a considered fashion, with the symptomatology of Thatcher’s dementia, and the mutability of memory. Thus, although the Thatcher character could be defined as an archetypal unreliable narrator (husband Denis’s appearance is quickly revealed as a visual hallucination; her carers whisper conspiratorially about “managing” her behavior, and daughter Carole remarks on her increasing forgetfulness), the film insists on the emotional coherence of her perspective and aligns the viewer unambiguously with Thatcher throughout. Persuasive temporal segues (home movie footage of the young Thatcher twins morphs seamlessly into “real” life) and the intensity of Thatcher’s hallucinations (husband Denis is an ambivalent figure, in turn supportive and oppressive) combined with her acute awareness of the well-intended but patronizing way in which carers, health professionals, and family members regard her faltering cognition, offers arguably the most potent, experiential representation of dementia thus far seen on the contemporary screen. Recent studies have argued for a more nuanced understanding of memory in the context of dementia care practices. As a corollary, some argue for more complex depictions of the disease and its consequences in popular culture, including mainstream film (Basting, 2009). The Iron Lady signals an encouraging development in the move toward such representational complexity.