My Life Without Me Information

My Life Without Me is a 2003 Spanish/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, tries to setup her husband with another woman and have an affair to get to know what it's like to have sex with another man. 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.