Gordon Pinsent

Like what?

Consider 2006's Away From Her, starring Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent.

This film is a direct, expanded thematic mirror to the James Garner and Gina Rowlands elderly scenes in The Notebook.

Oh, the Alzheimer's storyline.

So this week we had "Colossus: The Forbin Project," which is from 1970.

It stars Eric Braeden, Susan Clark, and Gordon Pinsent.

Thinking this will prevent war, the US government gives an impenetrable supercomputer total control over launching nuclear weapons.

But what the computer does with the power is unimaginable to its creators.

Polly solved this through casting and extreme trust in her performers.

She cast Julie Christie as Fiona and Gordon Pinsent as Grant.

And the direction she gave Christie was brilliant.

She didn't have Christie play Alzheimer's as a loud, dramatic medical crisis or a set of theatrical symptoms.

It's devastating because it's so quiet.

That visual choice, the polite distance, perfectly captures Munro's prose.

And Gordon Pinsent, whose face is practically a topographic map of Canadian history, plays a man slowly realizing that his absolute loyalty to his wife and his immense guilt over his past can occupy the exact same afternoon.

And Polly completely refused the urge to moralize, which is so true to Munro.

It's a pretty good movie.

I mean, the U.S. president is played by Canadian national treasure Gordon Pinsent.

This

is the president of the United States of America.