MY LIFE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1993 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Bruce Joel Rubin himself directs the fourth film in his "Dying and the Death Experience" series. Michael Keaton plays a dying public relations executive who videotapes life lectures for his yet unborn child and the tapes lead him to resolve the unfinished business of his youth. Some good believable human drama here is sabotaged by gratuitous mysticism about the nature of death. Rating low +1 (-4 to +4).
Bruce Joel Rubin has previously written the story of BRAINSTORM and screenplays of JACOB'S LADDER and GHOST, each exploring its own mystical view of life after death. His latest film focuses a little more closely on the dying experience itself. Bob Jones (Michael Keaton) had a sad childhood filled with disappointments and he has tried hard to bury that past. But now he is heading for the biggest disappointment of all. Just when his life was coming together with his beautiful wife (Gail, played by Nicole Kidman) pregnant with their first child, Bob was diagnosed as having terminal cancer. Now in his days remaining he is taking all of his fatherly advice and putting it on videotape as a legacy for the child that he may never know. Bob wants to be sure his child knows who Bob was. But Bob himself is not sure who he is. He has intentionally buried his unhappy childhood in the Russian immigrant community of Detroit. As part of that burial he had even changed his name to Jones from Ivanovich as part of his escape from the past. Now that he is dying he must come to terms with that past in his few remaining days, or he will never finish that business.
Rubin's script is often moving, as we would expect. It would be difficult to make a film that shows the dying process in such detail without being moving and at some level manipulative. But surprisingly here the experienced Rubin has problems with the very mechanics of script-writing. There are places where the script just does not convey what is going on. For example, the first time we are aware that Gail knows about the tapes, she is watching a tape about herself and she is angry. Why? Is she angry about the project of making the tapes? Is she angry about the content of this particular tape? It is not clear from the script. And with the writer being the director, if Rubin thinks the idea is conveyed, nobody can overrule him. Gail's mother is an important character in the plot, but for several scenes it is unclear if she knows about her son-in-law's condition and the interpretation of those scenes makes knowing important.
This is a story that might well have been done better in other hands, in spite of Rubin's fascination with death. Rubin's previous films assumed a life after death. In some senses that was the whole point of GHOST and JACOB'S LADDER. MY LIFE did not need any mystical metaphysics to tell its story and it would have been a more poignant story without the nice comforting mystical view of life of life after death. However, Rubin gives in to the temptation to philosophize about survival of the soul and mystical healing processes and in doing so he kills much of the credibility the film had. This is a film that will get people thinking about the death experience and it is probably fairly accurate to the famous Elisabeth Kubler-Ross studies of the psychology of dying, but it also throws in some metaphysical fantasy without leaving it clear that it is fantasy.
MY LIFE has many good points, but often Rubin's screenplay betrays them and compromises. My rating would be a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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