A film from Canada, "My Life Without Me" is an understated account of a terminally ill woman's attempt to find meaning in her life before she dies. Anne is a 23-year old custodian who lives with her pool-cleaning husband and two daughters in a trailer behind her mother's house. When she receives the stunning news that she has only a few months to live, Anne decides to spend her remaining time doing all the things she never had a chance to do after she married and had her first child at seventeen. One of those goals involves having sex with someone besides her husband and getting a man to fall in love with her.
"My Life Without Me" approaches a tricky subject with sensitivity and a minimum of sentimentality, helping the movie to steer away from the soap opera trappings of its story. The film avoids overstating the unhappiness of Anne's life, making it clear that, while she may not exactly be living in the lap of luxury, she does have a loving husband who cares deeply about her, as well as two young girls who are obviously the apple of their mother's eye. This makes Anne's desire to break away and find something better both more perplexing and more poignant than if her domestic life were harrowing and dismal. With the new perspective that dying affords her, Anne begins to see how we spend our days in a futile effort to divert our attention from the reality that we will all one day die. Anne makes recordings for all the people who have meant something to her in her life, helping them to not only cope with her death but to find some meaning and happiness in the lives they are still living.
Sarah Polley gives a beautiful, heartbreaking performance as Anne, never allowing her character to become an object of pity despite the fact that she is a person being stricken down in the prime of her life. Her restrained style is matched by that of Deborah Harry as her bitter, eternally disappointed mother, Scott Speedman as her understanding husband, Mark Ruffalo as the man with whom she falls in love, and a whole host of other superb actors.
Although it veers a little too close to slick Harlequin romance at times (the too-good-to-be-true husband, the conveniently available one-true-love paramour), "My Life Without Me" is a subtle, heartfelt film that touches the emotions even as it gives the mind something to think about. The lovely closing scene is as thought provoking as it is moving, a fitting finale to a quiet little gem of a film.
"My Life Without Me" approaches a tricky subject with sensitivity and a minimum of sentimentality, helping the movie to steer away from the soap opera trappings of its story. The film avoids overstating the unhappiness of Anne's life, making it clear that, while she may not exactly be living in the lap of luxury, she does have a loving husband who cares deeply about her, as well as two young girls who are obviously the apple of their mother's eye. This makes Anne's desire to break away and find something better both more perplexing and more poignant than if her domestic life were harrowing and dismal. With the new perspective that dying affords her, Anne begins to see how we spend our days in a futile effort to divert our attention from the reality that we will all one day die. Anne makes recordings for all the people who have meant something to her in her life, helping them to not only cope with her death but to find some meaning and happiness in the lives they are still living.
Sarah Polley gives a beautiful, heartbreaking performance as Anne, never allowing her character to become an object of pity despite the fact that she is a person being stricken down in the prime of her life. Her restrained style is matched by that of Deborah Harry as her bitter, eternally disappointed mother, Scott Speedman as her understanding husband, Mark Ruffalo as the man with whom she falls in love, and a whole host of other superb actors.
Although it veers a little too close to slick Harlequin romance at times (the too-good-to-be-true husband, the conveniently available one-true-love paramour), "My Life Without Me" is a subtle, heartfelt film that touches the emotions even as it gives the mind something to think about. The lovely closing scene is as thought provoking as it is moving, a fitting finale to a quiet little gem of a film.