3.5 Stars With Sarah Polley, Deborah Harry, Scott Speedman and Mark Ruffalo. Directed by Isabel Coixet. MPAA Rating: R 106 minutes Release Date: Oct. 17
A human being faced with death, be it the threat of their own death or that of someone around them, is never supposed to resent death, but rather seize life by the horns and live each day to its fullest. At least, this is the way it is in the world of film. Movies about death, even those with depressing endings, are filled with this kind of carpe diem sentiment. "My Life Without Me" is that kind of movie, but not in the sappy, unrealistic fashion most films embrace.
Ann, played poetically by Sarah Polley, is only 23, but has two daughters, is married to the first man she ever slept with, works as a nighttime janitor at university she could never afford to attend and lives in a trailer in her mother's backyard. And she is dying. Seems like a rough life, but it's really not as obscenely depressing as it sounds.
Ann finds out soon into the film that she only two months left to live, and unexpectedly decides to keep that knowledge to herself. Instead on worrying those around her with thoughts of her death, she begins to plan for her life without her.
Throughout the film director Isabel Coixet raises many questions, mostly about the human response to death. To what extent would any one of us embrace our own life with the same sense of final passion as Ann upon learning that we were to die soon? And would any of us be able to keep this information to ourselves? And, on a more generic level, what would we want to do before we died?
Shortly after learning that she is going to die, Ann sits down to make a list of things she must do before she dies. This list (and the very act of making the list) borders on clich?, but the items contained on it are so simple that they must make sense to any of us. The list ranges from getting fake nails to making someone fall in love with her.
And because this is a film, Ann gets her chance to make someone fall in love with her when she meets Lee (a very shy Mark Ruffalo) in a laundromat and he becomes interested in her. Hesitantly Ann engages in a relationship of sorts with Lee, and love ensues. We are able to forgive Ann for cheating on her husband because she is dying and just wants to experience more than one man in her short lifetime.
Coixet succeeds in making a brilliantly poetic film that refuse to glorify Ann's acquired passion for life and her desire to live her last few months the best she can. In the eyes of the camera, and thus the viewer, Ann is just another person, dealing with just another problem. That problem simply happens to be extraordinarily serious.
The standout of this film, however, is Polley. She graces the screen with such an unimposing, but beautiful presence that it is impossible not to fall madly in love with her, and with her character. In the role of Ann mother, Deborah Harry (yes, that Deborah Harry), is the other standout. Polley and Harry's understated acting drives this film and both succeed in making us desire to look at them.
"My Life Without Me" is certainly not without sentiment or the sense that one should embrace each day as if it were the last, but it is also not one that leave you gagging with the Hollywood sap most movies about death (eh-hem, "A Walk to Remember") spew forth. It absolutely leaves you questioning your attitudes towards both life and death, but leaves the decision on what that attitude should be up to you.
