A young woman's last gasp comes off more as a grasp for self-fulfillment in My Life Without Me.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published December 4, 2003
[Photo: Sony Classics]
An old friend (Mark Ruffalo) looks at a sleeping Ann (Sarah Polley), who manipulates the situation to make him fall in love with her.
People die each day, but rarely the way they do in movies.
Death from cancer seems prettier and nobler on the screen than in life. Auto fatalities typically seem cleaner, swifter in films. Movies show us the way we would like to believe we can die, although it rarely seems to turn out that way.
It may be inspirational for some melodramas to show characters beginning better lives just before theirs ends, and how that process affects their loved ones. Terms of Endearment and One True Thing come to mind. Other films, like Isabel Coixet's My Life Without Me, make the redemptive process so self-centered that survivors' memories would likely be fonder if the dearly departed hadn't tried so hard.
Sarah Polley has been a consistently believable actor, but even she has a tough time playing Ann, a 23-year-old mother and school janitor whose husband Don (Scott Speedman) doesn't work much. But he's a nice guy, so life is fine overall until a medical checkup reveals that Ann is dying of ovarian cancer. Two months to live, tops.
Ann gets over the shock by pledging to do everything she can to prepare her family for a future without her. Some of her plans are admirable until it becomes apparent that Ann isn't willing to do anything except wish. She would like her mother (Deborah Harry, looking like Faye Dunaway) to find happiness, yet does little except listen to her glum monologues. She would like Don to find a new wife but says it so pathetically into a tape recorder that he probably couldn't do it without serious guilt.
Other things on Ann's to-do list are pure Hollywood, despite Coixet's indie flick touches. Ann tape records birthday messages for both of her daughters through their 18th birthdays. She makes amends to her father (Alfred Molina), with prison visitation-room glass as a prop. Chiefly, she begins an affair with an old friend (Mark Ruffalo) just to see what sleeping with another man is like. Then she manipulates the situation to make him fall in love with her.
She doesn't tell many of the key players in her life about the diagnosis, in essence shutting them out so she can do her own thing, presumably on their behalf.
Polley struggles mightily to make Ann sympathetic and never goes too far with the terminal nobility angle. She's far too subtle an actor for that. Yet she can't improve the notion that Ann's higher consciousness is the benefit of her conscience eroding. That probably isn't what Coixet intended.
My Life Without Me
Grade: C
Director: Isabel Coixet
Cast: Sarah Polley, Scott Speedman, Mark Ruffalo, Deborah Harry, Amanda Plummer, Maria de Medieros, Alfred Molina
