MY LIFE WITHOUT ME
Directed by: Isabel Coixet.
Produced by: Esther García & Gordon McLennan.
Written by: Coixet.
Director of Photography: Jean-Claude Larrieu.
Edited by: Lisa Robinson.
Music by: Alfonso Vilallonga.
Released by: Sony Picture Classics.
Country of Origin: Spain/Canada (in English). 106 min. Rated: R.
With: Sarah Polley, Scott Speedman, Deborah Harry, Mark Ruffalo & Alfred Molina.

A health crisis reawakens the higher consciousness of 23-year-old Ann, played by Sarah Polley with a natural beauty reminsicent of Julianne Moore. Ann decides to take charge and make the best of her situation. In this race against time, Ann realizes there's no time like the present to tap unfulfilled longings and to prepare her loved ones for what appears to be the inevitable. Crowded with her husband and two daughters in a trailer park home, and with a depressed mother living 20 yards away, Ann's world is made even more enclosed when she chooses to fight her last fight in secrecy. In the book, Pretending the Bed is a Raft, upon which the film is based, author Nanci Kincaid has Ann share her predicament with those closest to her. Keeping Ann’s situation to herself should not necessarily deflate the drama, but it begs the queston why Coixet chose to exclude all of the supporting characters from Ann’s trials. In doing so, they serve more as pawns to fulfill her checked-off grocery list of internal needs, objectives obtained with almost no obstacles at all. But the tendency to round off the edges doesn’t stop here. Unlike in the book, time progresses, but Ann's appearance never reflects her worsening physical state; her unemployed husband, early on, finds a job; and an undercurrent tension between mother and daughter barely gets beyond a ripple. The film almost continually irons out the complexities of Ann's life. Her jailed and alienating father, whom Ann visits after 10 years’ absence, is almost immediately repentant. And need it be mentioned that a lover appears at just the requested moment? Although the supporting cast on the whole delivers nicely understated performances, the film's impact suffers from a screenplay that could have taken Ann on a more provocative soul-searching quest, but instead guides her along a rather predictable, less engaging, and somewhat sentimental journey around the block. Max Rennix, New York-based actor/writer
September 26, 2003