My Life

Movies 365: Day 40 – My Life

If I have one problem with My Life, it’s that it’s entirely too obvious with everything that it does. Though not nearly as bad an offender as Crash, My Life is entirely lacking in subtlety, which is a shame, because the basic idea of the film, and the cast are better than the final product. Michael Keaton stars as Bruce Jones, a man diagnosed with kidney cancer and given a few months to live, as he documents his life for his unborn son. The cast is universally good, with nice performances from Keaton, Nicole Kidman as his wife, Haing S. Ngor as a Chinese naturalist, and Bradley Whitford as his brother. The unfortunate thing of it is that any subtlety, is completely absent, nothing is brought up without having great significance, and nothing is said without being completely spelled out for the audience, so that we know exactly what is going on. It’s not offensive like Crash, because My Life is never insulting to the audience, it’s just never anything other than predictable. While it’s certainly not a bad movie, it’s unfortunately not a very good one either, which is a shame, because the performances all deserve a better film.