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But enough about The Matrix. Perhaps what we need is not another ponderous allegory about man vs. machine on a ravaged world of computer graphics and bad dialogue, but rather a film that's content to go micro, investigating the ordinary textures of an ordinary life about to be upended by that most ordinary of implacable enemies, cancer.
In My Life Without Me, Sarah Polley turns in a pleasingly understated performance as Amy, a 23-year-old who's just learned that uterine cancer will kill her in two months. Until now she's lived a quiet existence, married to a nice lug named Don (Scott Speedman), tending to her two young daughters, generally happy despite her reduced circumstances (they live in a trailer). Under the surface, though, she is, like all of us, desperate for a larger, more interesting life. Concealing her illness from her family—she tells them her diagnosis was anemia—she sets out to embrace her last two months with a new passion, in the process falling for a guy she meets in the laundromat (Ruffalo) and reconnecting with her absentee dad.
Sounds like the formula for a Sunday night CBS weepie, but director Isabel Coixet pulls back from the slick, narrative tactics of typical chick flicks, instead employing mild indie-film touches: odd camera angles and close-ups, discordant string music behind the voice-overs. If Lifetime ever starts an art-film network, this will be the first movie it shows.
While the film benefits from knowing the difference between emotion and sentimentality, it does suffer from some heavy-handed storytelling. The scene with Amy's father (Alfred Molina) adds nothing; you feel Coixet checking a plot development off her list. Amy's mother (Harry) is a defeated woman fending off the bitterness of a life that saw every dream denied; she's the very obvious foreshadowing of the future Amy won't have. Later, a woman conveniently named Amy moves in next door, is entranced by our heroine's daughters ... you know she'll be a suitable surrogate mom.
Nonetheless, the film works up a genuine sense of loss, all the more by avoiding scenes of bravura anguish. Instead, you have Amy, shaken but determined, taping affirmative messages for several years' worth of her daughters' birthdays. Quietly wrenching. No computer graphics needed.