"My Life Without Me"

Sarah Polley shines in this soggy hankie of a movie about a young mother given two months to live.

By Charles Taylor

Sep 26, 2003 | Sarah Polley is such an unforced, unfussy, unaffected actress that nearly everything she does on-screen feels both believable and sympathetic. Playing a young mother given two months to live after a diagnosis of ovarian cancer in "My Life Without Me," Polley avoids the temptations to give in to melodrama that other actors would have fallen for. With the exception of one badly written speech that nobody could pull off, Polley doesn't work to form a lump in our throats. In the scene where she gets the terminal diagnosis, you see her lower lip tremble with the beginning of a sob and just as abruptly see her choke it back. In giving this young woman her dignity, Polley affords the audience theirs as well. Any tears spilled over Polley's performance are earned, honestly.

Her performance is all the more remarkable because "My Life Without Me" is so bad, and nobody connected with it appears to have noticed that Polley's character, Ann, is something of a monster.

According to writer-director Isabel Coixet, in the Nanci Kinkaid story on which "My Life Without Me" is based (from the book "Pretending the Bed Is a Raft") the young woman tells everyone that she is dying. In the director's statement among the movie's production notes, Coixet says she wondered, "What would happen if [she] didn't tell anyone ... if she discovered that the greatest gift she could ever do [sic] to her family, especially to her kids, was not to burden them with the weight of her future death?"

That's not a bad dramatic idea, and Polley makes it work. It's understandable that Ann decides she doesn't want to spend her last weeks in a hospital, drugged to the gills and going through a battery of tests and procedures. It's courageous, though, that she doesn't want her husband, Don (Scott Speedman, who's very sweet in a thankless role), or her two young daughters to have that as their last memories of her. The trouble is that instead of being about a woman who wants to fade gracefully away from the people she loves so they can get on with their lives, the film becomes about someone who is egocentric enough to ensure that they never forget her.

Polley's best, most affecting scene is the one where she pulls into an empty parking lot late at night and tape-records messages for her daughters for every one of their birthdays until the age of 18. As with everything else here, her performance is held beautifully in check. She puts just a slight, fleeting quaver into her voice, betraying her sadness but determined to keep it bright and happy for her kids' sake. This is also the most appalling scene in the movie.

You can understand Ann leaving a message for her daughters telling them to be strong and telling them that she loves them, or a message for when they come of age trying to impart some of her experience to them. But if her choice not to tell them she's going to die comes from a desire not to burden them, then imagine how these little girls (who are 6 and 4 in the movie's present tense) are going to feel at 8 or 10, knowing that every birthday means that along with greeting cards the postman is bringing a tape from their dead mother telling them not to be sad. (Ann arranges with her doctor to mail out the tapes each year.) Is this her idea of letting them get on with their lives? Had Philip Roth conceived of a ploy like this it might have provided Alexander Portnoy with the ultimate Jewish-mother joke: "Hello, darling, this is your mother. I'm still dead but I want you should have a happy birthday."

Ann got pregnant at 17 and married Don, her high-school sweetheart. Now, at 23 with two daughters, they live in a trailer in her mother's backyard and he is the only man she's ever slept with. Understandably, she wants to know what it's like to make love with a different man before she dies. Only a prude would begrudge Ann a taste of some sexual variety. But instead of finding a guy (or even a few different guys) for a pleasant one-night stand, she decides that one of the things she wants to do before she dies is to "make someone fall in love with me."

Lee (Mark Ruffalo) is the poor schlemiel whose heart she tramples on in order to fulfill that narcissistic wish. Lee is a bookish loner who's traveled the world and settled in Ann's small Canadian town, seemingly nursing a broken heart. There's nothing original about the conception of the character -- it's what a moonstruck adolescent might come up with -- and nothing particularly charming about Ruffalo's mannered performance (he seems to be apologizing for every line he speaks). Yet you can't help but feel for this guy who has his infatuation encouraged, only to be abandoned. Then, a few weeks later, he finds out the woman he fell in love with is dead.

Next Page: Does anyone in Canada ever have a good day? Does the sun ever shine there?

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