Themes: Dying Young, Battling Illness, Mothers and Daughters
Main Cast: Sarah Polley, Scott Speedman, Deborah Harry, Mark Ruffalo, Leonor Watling, Amanda Plummer, Maria de Medeiros
Release Year: 2003
Country: CA/ES
Run Time: 106 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Isabel Coixet's Mi Vida Sin Me (My Life Without Me) is a tale of a woman dying before her time. Sarah Polley plays Ann, a 24-year-old mother of two. Ann is married to Don (Scott Speedman), and they live near Ann's mother (Deborah Harry), who is bitter about the fact that Ann's father is serving a ten-year prison sentence. Ann learns that she has only a few months to live. She makes a series of goals to complete before her time on Earth comes to an end. Among her accomplishments are taking a lover (Mark Ruffalo), finding someone to care for Don, and recording birthday greetings for her two daughters. My Life Without Me was screened in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
Review
Rarely has a movie about dying been as unsentimental as Isabel Coixet's acerbic, heartbreaking melodrama: From the doctor's office to the deathbed, My Life Without Me is about as far removed from a "disease of the week" TV movie as filmmaking gets. It helps that the writer-director cast the incomparable Sarah Polley, an actress utterly in tune with Coixet's sensibilities. A fiercely independent performer who -- not unlike Jennifer Jason Leigh before her -- has used her drowsy gaze and humanist sensibilities to both good and bad effect, Polley at last finds a leading role that's strong, complex, and utterly sympathetic. As the terminal janitor Ann, Polley's able to play a working-class woman whose innate warmth and grace is enough to help her rise above her predicament as well as her occasional loss for words. The character's pledge never to reveal her illness to her loved ones internalizes most of the drama, which costs the film some momentum in its latter half. But Coixet never once resorts to spell-it-out narration or "seize the day" histrionics. Her heroine ends the film as she began it: reserved, modest, and with no desire for martyrdom. After playing both the Toronto and Telluride festivals in the fall of 2002, My Life Without Me secured a brief theatrical run in the U.S. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide
Ann (Sarah Polley) is a hard-working 23-year-old mother with two small daughters, an unemployed husband (Scott Speedman), a mother (Deborah Harry), who sees her life as a failure, and a jailed father whom she has not seen in ten years. She works nights as a janitor in a university she could never afford to attend, lives in a caravan in her mother's backyard, and has no aspirations. Her life changes dramatically when after a medical check-up she is diagnosed with endometrial cancer and told she has only two months to live. Deciding not to tell anyone of her condition, using the cover of anemia, Ann makes a list of things to do before she dies.
The film won many international and festival awards, including the Genie Award for Best Actress (Polley) and the Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (Coixet) and Best Song ("Humans Like You" by Chop Suey). The film was released on September 26, 2003 and ran for 12 weeks. It grossed $400,948 domestically and $9,326,006 from the foreign markets for a worldwide total of $9,726,954.[2]
