My Life. - movie reviews

National Review, Dec 13, 1993 by John Simon

I must warn you in the minimal space remaining against a movie of maximal dishonesty and stupidity: My Life, written and directed by Bruce Joel Rubin, the horrendous hack who gave us the stultifying Ghost and the pretentious, contemptible Jacob's Ladder. Here we have the happy young Los Angeles couple of Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman: she pregnant with their first baby, he about to die of a malignant tumor. I shall spare you the various sentimental simplicities, except to say that Keaton is videotaping his boring life and banal personality as a posthumous gift to his unborn child. Of course, he lives long enough to see, cuddle, and slobber over the adorable baby, the miracle of whose birth we too must witness in every last blatant detail.

The film dabbles in all kinds of shallow mysticism, bargain-basement philosophizing, and the notion that if you return to your humble Detroit roots, reconcile yourself to your Ukrainian-American family, and love your lovely wife to bits (as she does you), you can enter the realm of Thanatos peacefully, even ecstatically as you ride the same amusement-park roller-coaster that scared you in life, only now with your hands not clutching the bar in front of you, but waving liberatedly into a glorious final whiteout.

We are not spared a solitary verbal or visual platitude in this piece of treacle produced by Mr. Rubin's friend Jerry Zucker, who also gave us Airplanel and the Naked Gun movies. I may have seen worse films than this, but none that made me more ashamed of belonging to the same species as its makers.