My Life Without Me

My Life Without Me
File:My life without me ver2.jpg U.S. theatrical poster
Directed by	Isabel Coixet
Produced by	Esther García Gordon McLennan
Written by	Isabel Coixet
Based on	Pretending the Bed Is a Raft by Nanci Kincaid
Starring	Sarah Polley Scott Speedman Mark Ruffalo Amanda Plummer Deborah Harry
Music by	Alfonso Vilallonga
Cinematography	Jean-Claude Larrieu
Edited by	Lisa Robison
Distributed by	Sony Pictures Classics
Release dates	December 17, 2003
Running time	106 minutes
Country	Canada Spain
Language	English
Box office	$9,726,954 (INT)

My Life Without Me is a 2003 Canadian drama film directed by Isabel Coixet and starring Sarah Polley, Mark Ruffalo, Scott Speedman, and Leonor Watling. Based on the book Pretending the Bed Is a Raft by Nanci Kincaid, it tells a story of a 23-year-old woman, with a husband and two daughters, who finds out she is going to die soon. The film was produced by Pedro Almodóvar's production company, El Deseo.

Plot

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. Her life changes dramatically when, during a medical checkup following a collapse, she is diagnosed with metastatic ovarian 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. She decides to change her hair, record birthday messages for the girls for every year until they're 18, and tries to set up her husband with another woman. Feeling a longing to experience a life that was never available to her, she seeks out a man to experience how it feels to be in a sexual relationship with someone other than her husband. Her experiment ends up taking an emotional toll when she meets with a man named Lee, who ends up madly in love with her and is left heartbroken when Ann breaks up. He meets with her one last time and says that he will do anything to make her happy, taking care of her daughters and even finding her husband a job. She ends their relationship and never tells him that she is dying. At the end of the film Ann records a message to her husband telling him that she loves him and another one to Lee telling him the same. She then leaves all tapes she has recorded with her doctor asking him to deliver them after her death.

Cast

• Sarah Polley as Ann
• Scott Speedman as Don, Ann's husband
• Mark Ruffalo as Lee, a man with whom Ann has an affair.
• Deborah Harry as Ann's Mother
• Jessica Amlee as Penny, Ann's daughter
• Kenya Jo Kennedy as Patsy, Ann's daughter
• Amanda Plummer as Laurie, Ann's friend
• Leonor Watling as Ann, the Neighbor
• Maria de Medeiros as The Hairdresser
• Julian Richings as Dr. Thompson
• Alfred Molina as Ann's Father

Reception

My Life Without Me received generally positive reviews from film critics. As of December 2011, review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes has scored a 64% rating, with an average rating of 6.3 out of 10, based on 98 reviews.

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.

External links

• Official website: My Life Without Me at Sony Pictures Classics
• My Life Without Me at IMDb
• My Life Without Me at Box Office Mojo