MY LIFE WITHOUT ME A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2003 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): **
MY LIFE WITHOUT ME is the type of picture that will leave you scratching your head and wondering why it didn't touch you. A tragic story about Ann, a 23-year-old mother who is suddenly diagnosed with terminal cancer so severe that she has only "two months to live, maybe three," it stars the normally effective Sarah Polley (THE SWEET HEREAFTER) as Ann. Seeming detached from her part and just going through the motions of the acting, Polley leaves it to a superb supporting cast to carry the film, and they could probably have pulled it off if the story itself didn't have so many parts that don't quite ring true.
Ann, a university janitor who works the nightshift, lives in a poorly heated trailer that is permanently parked in her mother's backyard. Deborah Harry plays her mother, who works a menial job at a commercial bakery. Ann has two sweet young daughters and a lovely, affectionate and supportive husband, Don (Scott Speedman). Don, who looks like a surfer hunk, was unemployed but has just found a swimming pool construction job, which should last at least a year. They were a happy family and still are, except for Ann's illness which she decides never to reveal to them. (In one of the movie's best performances, Julian Richings brilliantly portrays her new physician, Dr. Thompson, who has trouble looking a terminally ill patient in the eye.)
Shortly after being diagnosed with cancer, Ann makes a list (as in Don McKellar's LAST NIGHT) of the things she wants to do before she dies. These include: seeing her father who has spent the last ten years in some unknown prison, making tapes for her girls' birthdays until they are eighteen and having an affair. She chooses Lee (Mark Ruffalo, YOU CAN COUNT ON ME), a guy whom she meets at the Ticky Poo Laundromat as the lucky lad. This is one of the many problems with the plot since she has no real passion for him, and, given her near perfect husband, it's never quite believable that she'd want to start an affair at this point in her life anyway. Still, with his nervous and touchingly awkward rendition of a painfully shy guy, Ruffalo makes the movie almost worth seeing for his performance alone. Almost.
MY LIFE WITHOUT ME runs 1:46. It is rated R for "language" and would be acceptable for teenagers.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, October 10, 2003. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the Camera Cinemas.
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