In his essay “Age, Actually,” Teju Cole writes about Michael Haneke’s movie Amour. The couple at the film’s core are fine at the film’s beginning – old but intact. Then the wife, Anne, smart and sarcastic until then, has a stroke and develops dementia. “Georges insists on being her caretaker,” Cole tells us, and the unspoken implication is that this choice is unnecessary and foolhardy; there are places to outsource people like Anne.

For much of the rest of the film, Georges and Anne move thro...