While the subject matter sounds morbid and depressing, the film is anything but! It vibrates with real life rhythms of speech and relationships
My Life Without Me (2003)
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Reviews Counted:100
Fresh:65
Rotten:35
Average Rating:6.3/10
Consensus: Sarah Polley keeps this production afloat with her moving performance.
Runtime: 1 hr 46 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: Ann is 23, she has 2 daughters, a husband who spends more time unemployed than working, a mother who hates the world, a father who has spent the last ten years in jail, a strange predilection for... Ann is 23, she has 2 daughters, a husband who spends more time unemployed than working, a mother who hates the world, a father who has spent the last ten years in jail, a strange predilection for the audio-books of soap operas and a job as a night janitor in a university she could never go to in the dayime. They live in a trailer on the yard of her mother’s house, on the outskirts of Vancouver. However, this gray existence changes completely when, after a medical check-up, a shy doctor tells her that she has very little time left, hardly two months to live. Ann decides to keep her condition a secret, not to tell anybody, not even her husband. She doesn't want people around her with long faces mumbling the word "death." She starts to make a list of "things to do before dying" which she completes little by little. The list goes from "saying exactly what I think" to "getting fake fingernails." Unexpectedly, Ann discovers an appetite for life that drives her to live her last days with a sensual and furious intensity she had not known before. During that time she prepares her daughters life without her, meets a solitary wounded man who she seduces (and paradoxically brings back to life), and faces what remains of her life with a courage she never knew she had. -- © Sony Pictures Classics [More]
Starring: Sarah Polley, Mark Ruffalo, Scott Speedman, Leonor Watling
Starring: Sarah Polley, Mark Ruffalo, Scott Speedman, Leonor Watling, Deborah Harry, Amanda Plummer, Maria De Medeiros
Director: Isabel Coixet
Director: Isabel Coixet
Screenwriter: Isabel Coixet
Producer: Esther Garcia, Gordon McLennan
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
Reviews for My Life Without Me
Coixet's dignified, heartfelt little indie drama proves that dying young doesn't always come with the schmaltz of a Julia Roberts movie. Outstanding.
My Life Without Me is an impressively acted, uplifting, thoughtful film that transcends its seemingly depressing subject matter. Highly recommended.
Uses a loose cinema verite style to give the film a dreamy blanket of quiet, avoiding the 'disease of the week' movie formula.
Despite several touching scenes, the script comes perilously close to being maudlin and, while competent, Polley doesn't have the flair to make anything special out of her big role.
Sarah Polley exudes a steadfast joie-de-vivre that ultimately won me over.
Plagued by phony poetic moments and self-conscious quirkiness (Maria de Medeiros appears as a braid-wearing hair stylist obsessed with Milli Vanilli...)
A movie about terminal illness that even the Lifetime Television Network might reject.
It's hard to take this movie seriously. It's the cinematic equivalent of dotting your i's with a big heart, a very youngish view of life and death in which everything is too neatly wrapped up with a bow.
Polley's Ann is scrappy, honest, and warm, not someone to be pitied or doubted or chastened.
My Life Without Me is a bold and honest film about a young woman who is forced to number her days and to fill them with as much pleasure and meaning as she can.
(...) Una de las películas más hermosas que se hayan filmado sobre eso tan extraño y tan temido que es el tiempo que queda antes de morir.
My Life Without Me is a young person's movie about death, the sort of adolescent daydream in which you imagine your own demise.
Sarah Polley shoots another movie in the foot with her ice-queen demeanour
“My Life Without Me” is both sad and hopeful as it tells how a tragic event can have positive ramifications.
Coixet's imaginative handling of her somewhat problematic material and a terrific cast make it worthwhile
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