MY LIFE WITHOUT ME B+
Spain Canada (106 mi)
2003 d: Isabel Coixet Official website [United
States]
You see things clearly
now. You see all these borrowed lives, borrowed voices, Milli Vanilli
everywhere. You look at all the things you can’t buy – now you don’t even want
to buy – all the things that will still be here after you’re gone, when you’re
dead. And then you realize that all the things in the bright window displays:
all the models and catalogues, all the colors, all the special offers, all the
Martha Stewart recipes, all the piles of greasy food, it’s just all there to
try to keep us away from death, and it doesn’t work.
—Ann (Sarah Polley)
This is a fragile, but intricately powerful and poetic film
about dying, but one which insists upon losing the morbidity and self-pity,
believing that doesn’t serve anyone’s best interests. Relying upon a beautifully unsentimentalized
performance from Sarah Polley, completely unglamorized, wearing little to no
make up, this is a bittersweet and highly personalized journey of the last two
months in a woman’s life. Very similar to
Gus van Sant’s Restless
(van Sant) (2011), this is another film about terminal illness which has seriously
divided audiences, where some actually have contempt for the film, calling the
protagonist immature and utterly selfish for *not* telling her family or loved
ones that she’s dying (a change made by the director from the original story), where their loathing for her personal choice about the
way she wants to die undermines their appreciation for the film, where
certainly part of this knee-jerk reaction is undoubtedly the fixed ideas that
exist in our heads about approaching death, where many are as rigid and solemn
as long-held religious views. Instead,
much like suicide, the argument goes, the inevitable finale leaves the family
in a state of turmoil, unable to say goodbye or share their final thoughts
before death. If you want that film, where
everyone does the responsible thing, watch Debra Winger in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983),
perhaps the ultimate weeper, a film nearly guaranteed to make you cry. Not taking anything away from that movie,
this is simply not that film. Adapted by
the director from Florida-born author Nanci Kincaid's short story Pretending the Bed is a Raft, where the
prevailing theme might best be expressed by a mother as she writes to her
daughter, “Women always know more about the facts of life because most of the
facts happen to women.” Though the
overriding theme is death, what’s equally significant is coming to terms with
one’s mortality, where the singlemost driving force of the film is refusing to
live a single last breath without love.
In a story that appears to have been written for Sarah
Polley (who lost her own mother to cancer at age 11), she literally inhabits the role of Ann, a young twentysomething mother
of two young girls (Jessica Amlee and Kenya Jo Kennedy) with a perpetually
unemployed but extremely likeable high school sweetheart husband Don, Scott
Speedman, who actually went to high school together in real life with Sarah
Polley, ironically working the night shift as a janitor mopping the floors and
cleaning the hallways of a university that symbolizes kids with a brighter
future, with an unnamed and disgraced father in prison, while living in a cramped
trailer in her harried mother’s (Deborah Harry) backyard just outside Vancouver. Clouded in an everpresent palette of layers upon layers of grey,
with a hovering mist of rain throughout, this is an unusual film filled with melancholy
and sadness, but also small moments that are so perfectly etched into our
imaginations with a kind of effortless naturalism, where Polley is onscreen for
nearly every shot, filled with beauty and grace, where the storyline becomes
synonymous with her interior frame of mind. In this film, selflessness defines the woman, as
she is literally viewed as collateral damage, the price paid for someone elses
victory. With little time to actually
sleep, Ann is the kind of working woman we take for granted in our society because
of the immense role they play in our lives, as they sacrifice all to take care
of others, having little time for themselves, exhibiting a kind of maternal
force that’s been providing for us since the dawn of time, all with a kind of
noble silence, never asking for or taking credit. It is this overriding and relentless sense of
dedication to others that can become an unbearable weight, always having to do
for others, continuing to do what’s expected.
When Ann realizes she has so little time left, her immediate response is
to spare her family the unwelcome sight of death, where visits to the hospital
with the inevitable ghastly horrors would be their final shared memories. True to her nature, she prefers another
way.
While the film is set in poverty, where living in a trailer
is a fact of life for this family, it is barely noticeable in this film and not
referred to again, as there is no pulling on the heartstrings due to her lowly
position, it's just a part of who Ann is.
When she writes out a list of 10 things to do before you die, in keeping
with her character, her choices are surprisingly modest. Filmed in subdued colors, there are moments
of surprising simplicity and power, occasionally dipping into surreal thoughts,
like a quick daydream, where all the shoppers in a supermarket suddenly break
out into dance My
Life Without Me (scene) - YouTube (1:05), a sequence completely improvised
on the set, or Ann’s heartfelt decision to record birthday messages for both
daughters for every year up until age 18.
Film critic Roger Ebert Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert] found this choice particularly nauseating, claiming
if he was one of those kids “I would burn the goddamn tapes” in anger at his mother’s
“stupidity.” This is a common view held
by someone who never had children. Speaking as
someone who actually raised two children that lost their mother at an early age, they
would have killed for those tapes, or anything else that could help remind them
of their mother, as they felt so guilty in forgetting her memory, like not remembering
the sound of her voice. In one of the
best scenes of the film, she visits her imprisoned father (the uncredited
Alfred Molina), where a children’s choir hauntingly sings “God Only Knows” The Langley School Project
: God only knows (3:05) to the empty corridors, where his thoughts
reverberate, “Some of us just can't live the kind of life that other people
want us to live. No matter how hard you try, you just can't do it.” Ann also meets and has an affair with a
fellow alienated soul, Mark Ruffalo as Lee, a guy living in an empty apartment
with no furniture, only piles of books, where he may as well be living in limbo. Their first and last kisses, with supremely
inventive music used in between, couldn’t be more memorable, or any less
romantic than Eastwood standing in the rain during THE BRIDGES OF MADISON
COUNTY (1995). Isabel Coixet is from
Barcelona, adding a female sense of elegance that might otherwise have been
lost, using a brilliant ensemble cast and one of the most perfectly chosen
musical soundtracks that simply elevates this material into unforeseen
heights. Often using slo mo and fast motion
changes of speed to reflect internalized thoughts, Polley’s intoxicating opening
inner narration couldn’t be more poetically perfect "This is you..."
First scene from " My life Without Me " - YouTube (1:31).
