Adapting the Short Story: Fidelity and Motivation in Sarah Polley’s Away From Her

This article explores the challenges of adapting modern short stories, using as a case study Away From Her (2006), Sarah Polley’s cinematic adaptation of Alice Munro’s ‘The bear came over the mountain’. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s adaptation theory, the article asks whether some common assumptions concerning the constraints of film can be sustained in relation to adaptations of short stories. Focusing specifically on the issue of Weltian ‘mystery’ that has become associated with the form, the article considers Polley’s claims to textual fidelity and her handling of the many tensions inherent in Munro’s elliptical story. The article pays particular attention to Polley’s treatment of the story’s silences and absences and highly ambiguous ending. It considers Polley’s manipulation of dialogue and visual and aural cues and argues that she ultimately compromises the story’s mystery through the elaboration of narrative structures favoured by Hollywood: the love story and the discovery story.