My Life Without Me
The Canadian actress Sarah Polley could pass for Uma Thurman's indie-film twin. She has the same street-lamp eyes, the same lanky grace, but she wears dowdiness like a badge of integrity. From some camera angles Polley is almost ugly, from others she's breathtakingly lovely, and her star quality comes from the sense that she doesn't seem to care either way. In 1997's ''The Sweet Hereafter,'' she used her shyness and flat voice to become the conscience of a grief-stricken town. In ''My Life Without Me,'' the grief is for her own imminent death, and she clasps it tightly to herself before letting others share it.
Isabel Coixet's film is a whimsical drama about terminal cancer, and if that notion sets your teeth on edge, well, so do parts of the movie. ''My Life'' asks an audience to accept that a woman could be informed she has two months to live and then withhold that information from her husband, mother, and two young daughters. Instead, Ann (Polley) sits down and makes a list of ''Things To Do Before I Die,'' which include taping farewell messages, finding a suitable replacement for her survivors, and sleeping with another man.
''I don't want the only thing my daughters remember to be me in a hospital,'' Ann says, but coursing underneath that rationale is a hunger for all the experiences she'll never have -- for experience itself. There's a selfishness there that ''My Life Without Me'' would do well to explore, but Coixet insists on her heroine's serene nobility, even when she's acting perversely.
The movie sands the edges off realism until it becomes a charmed universe in which supermarket shoppers break into dance routines and minor characters have empathetic flashbacks. Ann lives in a trailer home, but it's the biggest, most marvelous trailer home imaginable, and her handsome blue-collar husband, Don, (Scott Speedman) and gorgeous daughters, (Jessica Amlee and Kenya Jo Kennedy), are never, ever cranky. Her cynical bakery-worker mom is played by Blondie's Deborah Harry, and the adulterous affair, when it comes, is in the form of a lonely, magnetic Mark Ruffalo (the screwed-up hunk of ''You Can Count on Me'').
The result is a weird hybrid of European art-film and indie rawness -- director Coixet and producer Pedro Almodovar are Spanish, but the film was shot in British Columbia -- and it overlays dismal acting-class monologues with some of the loveliest Brazilian music you'll ever hear (not to mention many and strange versions of the Beach Boys' ''God Only Knows'').
When it works, ''My Life Without Me'' casts a wrenching glow. Coixet handles silence much better than she does dialogue, and for every dud scene like the one in which an eccentric hairdresser (Maria de Medeiros) natters on about her Milli Vanilli obsession, there are brief, transfixing moments of contemplation. For once, Polley has a role that forces her up against the limits of her naturalism -- the provincialism that has always set her apart is here both blessing and curse -- but her radiant calm serves her well. All she has to do is widen her eyes to suggest the panic that's never not there.
''My Life Without Me'' is a young person's movie about death, the sort of adolescent daydream in which you imagine your own demise. It has a naive, heartfelt selfishness that may offend some viewers, and a resolve that others will find intensely soothing. ''Dying's not as easy as it looks,'' cautions Ann's doctor (Julian Richings), but here it's as easy as a movie can make it.
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