My Life Without Me

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My Life Without Me

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My Life Without Me

Alfred Molina, Amanda Plummer, Deborah Harry, Jessica Amlee, Julian Richings, Leonor Watling, Maria de Medeiros, Mark Ruffalo, Sarah Polley, Scott Speedman

Ann is 23-years-old, she has 2 young daughters, a husband who spends more time unemployed than working, a mother who hates the world, a father who has spent the last ten years in jail, and a job as a ...( read more  read more... )night janitor in a university that she could never attend in the daytime. They all live in a trailer, on the yard of her mother's house, in the outskirts of Vancouver. However, this gray existence changes completely when, after a medical check-up, a doctor tells Ann that she has very little time left on this earth. Learning that she has hardly two months to live, Ann decides to keep her condition a secret, and refuses to tell anybody--not even her husband--about her time remaining. She does not want people around her with long faces, and obsessed with her approaching death. Ann starts to make a list of things to do before dying, which she completes little by little. The list targets a wide range of things to which she must attend, including carrying out tasks like: saying exactly what she thinks to certain people; as well as getting herself some fake fingernails. Unexpectedly, Ann discovers an appetite for life that drives her to live her last days with a sensual and furious intensity she had not known before. During this short time, she prepares her daughters for a life without her; she meets a solitary wounded man, whom she seduces; and most importantly, Ann faces what remains of her life with a certain steadfast courage she never knew she possessed.

Id: 10895079

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My Life Without Me Recent Reviews
  • kiriyamakazou
    May 26, 2009
    kiriyamakazou
    Despite being a great film for many reasons, My Life Without Me is one of those films that fails to connect. I don't mind a film being very different, but there still has to be an emotional anchor point. Here we find out that our heroine is dying, a fact she decides to keep from ...( read more)her family. This could work, after all it is kind of sweet sparing them from the pain. It worked in Ikiru, but that was a lonely man not looked fondly upon. He decides to make a good change for others, without any form of reward. In this film, Polley makes selfish decisions to quench her curiosity. Therefor, the best thing she can think of to stick on her "to do list" is "to do" another guy. It's actions like this that distance this film. That aside the acting, music and pacing is all fine. But what's the point if it fails to make you care or feel.
  • QueenCityFilms
    February 16, 2009
    QueenCityFilms
    I mean........it was a decent movie. Good script I suppose. I'm just not a big fan of this feelm maker. Wasn't too wild about the cinematography either, 80% of the movie was a shaky closeup...and I hate shit like that. Makes it too day-time soapISH. Blah.
  • EarthlyAlien
    January 9, 2009
    EarthlyAlien
    "This is you. Eyes closed, out in the rain. You never thought you'd be doing something like this, you never saw yourself as, I don't know how you'd describe it... like one of those people who like looking up at the moon, who spend hours gazing at the waves or the sunset or... ...( read more)I guess you know the kind of people I'm talking about. Maybe you don't. Anyway, you kind of like being like this, fighting the cold, feeling the water seep through your shirt and getting through your skin. And the feel of the ground growing soft beneath your feet. And the smell. And the sound of the rain hitting the leaves. All the things they talked about in the books you haven't read. This is you, who would have guessed it? You."

    Photobucket

    You could pass Sarah Polley in the street without giving her a second look. No Hollywood beauty, the almost criminally gifted young Canadian actress (now turned filmmaker) has nondescript fair hair, slightly buggy-blue eyes and a broad face with prominent gums showing above uneven teeth that I hope to God she never straightens. She has a soft, ethereal voice, and such is the breadth of her range that you may not even realize how many films you've seen her in over the last few years.

    Polley has the trick of raising ordinariness to a kind of exaltation, which she did most notably playing an eerily self-possessed teenager paralyzed in a school-bus accident in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter. In Isabel Coixet's My Life Without Me, the story of a "good" death accomplished under intolerable conditions, Polley plays Ann, a young woman who lives with her intermittently unemployed husband Don, played by Polley's UK-born fellow Canadian Scott Speedman, and two small daughters in a cramped trailer in her mother's unkempt backyard. The mother (a very good Deborah Harry) is a bitter woman who regales her granddaughters at bedtime with the parental misdeeds of Joan Crawford. Having collapsed on the job at the university where she works as a cleaner, Ann gets the news from a shy, sensitive doctor (Julian Richings) that she has an inoperable tumour and only weeks to live.

    Loosely based on a short story by Nanci Kincaid, My Life Without Me rests on a premise that cinema has overused to the point of vulgarity: When first we meet Ann, she's standing in torrential rain, smiling - inauspicious film shorthand for someone who's just made the transition from surviving life to living it to the fullest. In Kincaid's version, Ann more plausibly freaks and goes around telling everyone she knows that she's dying; in the film, she forces the doctor to look her in the eye, asks him for a candy, then goes off and tells her family that she's anemic and needs to rest. Then she calmly makes a list of things to do before she dies, from recording messages for her daughters for every birthday until they hit 18, to having false nails put on, to taking a new lover and visiting with her jailbird father (Alfred Molina).

    My Life Without Me is not Coixet's first film, but in more ways than one it feels like it is. She piles on symmetries and coincidences that stretch belief. The film is propelled by the less-than-startling notion that we only start living when we're under death's gun, and to drive home the point, Ann is surrounded by friends and family - including that statutory kook Amanda Plummer as a diet-obsessed overeater - fretting about things that don't matter or can't be helped. And it all but caves under Coixet's desire, like that of her heroine, to make everything come right.

    Fearing we'd fail to grasp the grimness of their lives, she swathes her working-class characters in night, fog and rain. Yet despite the atmospheric clichés, Lisa Robison's crisp, imaginative editing makes for some achingly lovely scenes: quick cuts of the excellent Mark Ruffalo as Ann's potential lover, leaning further and further forward on a rickety Laundromat chair to watch ardently over the exhausted Ann as she sleeps on an ancient sofa; Deborah Harry's beautiful bone structure bathed in night-time shadow, sagging under the blows life has dealt her; fleeting and blissfully unexplained shots of a boy making music on wineglass rims.

    Above all there's Polley, animating Ann's pallor as she lets a whole palette of contradictory emotions - fear, anger, fatigue, then a trembling radiance - seep through her expressionless features to redeem her from the rote sainthood she's been prescribed. My Life Without Me was produced by El Deseo S.A., Pedro Almodóvar's studio, and one sees the Spanish director's influence in not only Coixet's work but also in the way Polley edges her Madonna with a touch of the reckless sensualist. Straining to make everything turn out fine for her family and friends, Ann is impossibly holy. Transforming her into a woman who wants what she wants and reaches for it now, Polley not only subverts cliché but humanizes one of the most hard-heartedly malicious phrases in North American English - trailer trash.

    "Without dreams you can't fucking live."
  • mistershinobi
    September 18, 2008
    mistershinobi
    Isabel Coixet proves (if it needed to be proved) that she is an excellent filmmaker that has some serious stuff in her mind she needs to get out. Her screenplay takes you by the cliché road of "I have 2 months before I die" with the hand of an expert in emotions and her direction...( read more) makes Sarah Polley the best actress on Earth just for a while. Coixet seems to have a fascination for her and for cars as the best (and most heartbreaking) scenes are into a car: Ann recording birthday messages for her daughters... Ann and Lee kissing and screaming... Ann's mom remembering how sad she is.

    Isabel Coixet is a pure talent that needs to be seen and Sarah Polley and Mark Ruffalo prove once more how great actors they are.

    A masterpiece.
  • crackingdanio
    May 15, 2008
    crackingdanio
    its depressing, its uplifting, its life and death. A young mother leads out the remaining months of her life before she dies of cancer. There will be tears, as ever polley is amazing she is the films glue.
  • JaneDoeNili
    December 3, 2009
    JaneDoeNili
    I just loved how plaine and simple the story is told. Very emotional, very sweet. Excellent acting. I desperately love Mark Ruffalo...
  • theloneowl
    November 6, 2009
    theloneowl
    Triste, dall'inizio alla fine, anche nei momenti più belli.
    Ho pianto come una pazza.
  • anospi
    November 4, 2009
    anospi
    Low budget, depressing, cliched, but ultimately a good film with some moving moments.
  • stilettokillerz
    November 3, 2009
    stilettokillerz
    Simple, beautiful, yet depressing. Nice story and I like the way Ann talks to herself.
  • magnolia12883
    October 20, 2009
    magnolia12883
    Isabel Coixet's slice of life is a bittersweet romance, a dour drama, a tearjerking soap opera and a pretty shamelessly manipulative melodrama. Ann (Sarah Polley) is a 23-year-old night janitor at a university in a small town (possibly in Canada). She is married to high school sw...( read more)eetheart Don (Scott Speedman from TV's "Felicity"), a swimming pool designer, and has two kids. Her mother (Deborah Harry; yes) is a bitter working stiff, still angry at her former husband (Alfred Molina), who is in prison. Her co-worker and best friend is Laurie (Amanda Plummer). One day, Ann collapses and goes to the hospital. Dr. Thompson (Julian Richings of TV's "Kingdom Hospital") informs her, completely without looking her in the eye, that she is dying of cancer. Ann makes first one difficult decision (she will create a list of 10 things to do before she dies) and then another (she will keep her death from her family and all others so as to save them the pain of the truth). The film then will consist of Ann going about her everyday life, including creating tape messages for her daughters' birthdays all the way through their 18th birthdays, carrying on a sexual affair with a lovesick loner called Lee (Mark Ruffalo), and screening her neighbor, also named Ann (Leonor Watling), as a potential replacement for her family to embrace. The film is based on a book by Nanci Kincaid and was written and directed by Isabel Coixet, a Spanish filmmaker who made the dark indie comedy "Things I Never Told You" (1996), which featured Lili Taylor as a suicidal young woman who falls for her suicide hotline operator (Andrew McCarthy). Though the film has a certain slice of life quality, observing the everyday details of Ann's life and the lives of those around her, it also has the contours of a soap opera, without the payoff. There is always the threat of revelation, but it almost never rears its head. The results are shamelessly manipulative, without ever going over the top. The film is grounded by Sarah Polley's performance as a woman with convictions, faced with a dire future, who makes her family's decisions for them without their consent and lives with herself (for a time) in doing so. The film then is a somewhat flawed affair, but not bad for what it is.
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