Movies into Film
My Life Without Me
Directed by Isabel Coixet
Canada/Spain, 2003
The good chump Ruffalo and sleeping un-beauty Polley (Photo: Sony Pictures Classics)
It’s hard to hate entirely a film where a man and a woman listen to and talk about the great cabaret singer Blossom Dearie whilst en route to an adulterous tête-à-tête. Ms. Dearie’s fresh-as-yesterday 1957 recording “Try Your Wings” figures prominently in one of My Life Without Me’s less intolerable sequences; otherwise this brightly-colored treacle, which concerns a 23-year-old woman’s decision not to reveal her impending death to family, friends, and her extramarital lover, offers plenty to hate. Having watched a close relative of mine wither from the same disease, I was loath to see ovarian cancer used as grist in what amounts to a postmodern deodorant commercial about death. Tasteless as the premise is, the sociopathic reactionaries at the promo screening I attended could not stifle their giggles and guffaws when the woman’s doctor tells her, “There’s nothing we can do.” Among the cast, bearded Mark Ruffalo makes a sympathetic chump for the dying seductress, and Leonor Watling has a riveting cameo as a nurse with a nightmarish tale to tell. In the insufferably manipulative lead role, Sarah Polley, who was outstanding in The Sweet Hereafter and has done nothing of that caliber since, is as clammy as paste. – NPT
October 2003
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com