My Life Without Me (2003)

Touches You

Please don't spend money on this.

Instant Favorite.

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

"It's better to forget, than to remember me and cry." - The Cure Isabel Coixet's "My Life Without Me" stars Sarah Polley as a hard working mother who learns that she has but a few months left to live. Polley keeps her impending death from her kids and husband, and begins instead to write and record a series of notes and tapes for her family. Through this material she hopes to "be with them" long after she has passed away. Polley's impending demise is mirrored to the lives of various other characters, including her own mother. Though these characters are alive, they wade through life like the walking dead, treading water in a world rife with pain, disappointment and morbid suffocation. Elsewhere Polley spends her last months indulging in various experiences, most notably an adulterous love affair with a character played by Mark Ruffalo.Polley and Ruffalo - two underrated actors - are as powerful as they often are, and the film contains a number of neat little moments which are sensitively directed and well acted. The film's overall plot, though, is well worn. It's hard to elevate material like this, or take it interesting, new places. The film's sentimental and predictable and the cast, who are often wonderfully raw, deserve much better.7.5/10 – Worth one viewing.

If it wasn't for the camera style, I'd give it an eight. This is a personal matter of taste: I hate constantly trembling cameras and that's why i won't rate this movie 8.My Life Without Me is a drama, but it doesn't reach the "depressive point". It stays somewhere between Sad and "cold winters night". Then, the feelings You'll get watching probably won't be like watching Requiem for a Dream.My Life without me has an interesting character besides the main one. And Im talking about Laurie (amanda plumer) and she's obsession about diets and calories. What is kinda rare to see in movies, but the problem is a failure to explain (even using few words) why she has it. Good acting, soundtrack and photography are obfuscated by the constant moving camera. Why doest directors use a tripod? Is the objective make us feeling like near the actors, spying them? that sucks.Another issue (can I call this an issue?) when Ann receives the new that she has a cancer and probably Will die from it is she doesn't care that much. Doesn't cry, doesn't scream, doesn't anything. It looked like she was already thinking about what to do even before have got that cancer found. This lack of emotion ain't nothing like someone whose just got a cancer diagnosis. It ain't real, it doesn't even look human.My Life Without me is an great movie. It makes s question how really would be our companions lifes without us. And if you haven't asked yourself yet. Watch and then you'll do it.

I have always been a fan of the work of Sarah Polley. She always creates intriguing, realistic characters. She doesn't seem to be acting, she seems to be occupying the character as if it were real. This movie might not have worked with a less talented actress.The movie is set and filmed in British Columbia, and concerns a slice of life that many of us are not familiar with. A young couple, with two children, living in a small trailer home in the back yard of the wife's mother. The husband works with a company that builds home swimming pools, the wife works evenings as a custodian at a local school. They don't take vacations, they buy used clothes, they use the local laundromat. But they seem happy. And it all seems very realistic.Polley is Ann, and one day feeling particularly puny goes to the hospital. After a way too long wait and several tests finds out she has tumors growing and they are not curable. At 24, forced to examine her whole existence. With about 2 months to live. So she goes to a small café' and over a cup of coffee and a slice of pineapple cheese cake makes her list of "the things she wants to do before she dies." Surprisingly one of them is to get someone else to fall in love with her. Perhaps not surprising is to find a wife for her husband who can be a good mother to her girls. And through all this not tell anyone what her situation was.Her husband is Scott Speedman as Don . I don't like Speedman as an actor, ever since I first saw him on "Felicity". He has the type of face that smiles even when there shouldn't be a smile, and I find it very irritating. But here his role is relatively small and I didn't object too strongly.There is no glamor to this movie, it has very little music and is short in a gritty style. Many will not like it, but I found it to be a very good viewing. It made me wonder what I would do, what would be on my "bucket list" if I found out I was going to die shortly.SPOILERS: She meets a guy in the laundromat (Mark Ruffalo) and ends up having a love affair with him, not to cheat on her husband, but to experience something different, since Don is the only man she had even ever kissed, and by 17 she was already a mother. She went to visit her dad (Alfred Moliona) in prison. She made tapes for her girls, to be played for each of their birthdays until they reached 18. She found the single lady next door, also Ann, to be the perfect new mom for her girls.

Aside from a couple good acting performances, this film has nothing going for it. A (very) young woman finds out she has only a couple months to live, and takes this news as if she had been told her car needed a new transmission. Get a second opinion? No--why bother? See an oncologist? Nah... Just ask for candy from the doctor and make a few tapes for people to listen to after you're dead.So, we don't get to witness any real emotional response from the main character. And because she refuses to tell anyone she's dying, we don't get to experience any other characters' responses, either. The whole film is thus boring, tedious and pointless.The role of the "other man" is underplayed and just... weird. The voiceovers don't add much, and even if they attempted to, it would be a cheap, easy way out.But of course, any movie with a person dying of cancer gets an automatic 8-to-10 vote from most people. Ridiculous.Please rate this review as "not helpful". I WANT you to!