DREAM, COMFORT, MEMORY TO SPARE. With its snowy social-democratic setting, and Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie giving off strong Erland Josephson-Liv Ullman vibes, Away From Her put me in mind of late Bergman. The story -- wife of retired professor gets Alzheimer's, professor copes with separation -- puts humanism into a bleak landscape, and rookie filmmaker Sarah Polley hits the symbolic angles: as disease estranges the longtime lovers, the white wastes of Canada take on added significance, and when the abandoned old man stops shoveling his walk the metaphor's hard to miss.

But Away From Her is much stronger in its psychological than its cosmic dimension. The simple human qualities with which the couple approach their coming separation -- she summons courage, he succumbs to guilt and grief -- are heartbreakingly detailed from the first misfiled frying-pan to the inevitable trip to the nursing home. When the wife forms an attachment with a fellow resident there, the professor's jealousy, bewilderment, and sorrow are familiar to anyone who has ever helplessly watched love slip away.

The professor's steps toward adjustment and acceptance follow a classic pattern, but with enough brilliantly surprising turns to keep them lifelike. [Mild spoilers ahead.] For example, one day the professor catches a caretaker, who has heretofore been cheerfully supportive, at a bad moment. It's a fine scene, but what makes it is that we see him anticipating and even inviting her quiet outburst before she has it. And when the professor becomes involved with a woman, and seems to think he has successfully compartmentalized his feelings for his wife, it is only slightly more of a surprise to him than for us when the girlfriend tells him, "it would help me if you could pretend."

By this manner the story won my devotion even as it devolved into the sort of lessons in life and love that I normally find annoying. The acting couldn't be better. Christie, intelligent and self-aware, is determined to go into the unknown with dignity for her own sake as well as her husband's. Her later confusion is specific and unsentimental; dementia ravages her perception but leaves her personality intact, which gives the performance its great poignancy. Michael Murphy wordlessly suggests a strong spirit encased in illness; Olympia Dukakis wears a thick skin that, happily, turns out to be quite permeable. Pinsent lumbers with ursine doggedness through his gauntlet, nursing his pain until he develops the new kind of strength that can override it. If it has some resemblance to a Lifetime movie, it is one that is about real lifetimes, and that makes all the difference.

UPDATE. Fixed a convoluted passage; thanks, Milo. I also want to add that Away From Her shows something you don't see a lot in the movies: an awareness that even learning to cope with loss doesn't make things all better. We see a young deaf woman talking in sign language with her infirm mother. We learn that the mother was the only one member of the family who bothered to learn to sign. Inevitably, the old woman forgets how to sign and even that the deaf woman is her daughter, and runs away from her. Backlit by pale winter light from the windows -- "plenty of natural light," the place's director keeps telling the professor -- the young woman suddenly appears engulfed in radiant solitude.

Such primal, painful events can be "moved on" from, after a fashion, but not forgotten; nor can we escape being changed by them. Survival is only a conditional victory. This mature perspective frustrates mushbrains who squirm when Cinderella endings are not on offer, but grown-ups may appreciate the truth in it.