Looking for Meaning of ‘Life’

Any resemblance between “My Life” (citywide) and real life is strictly coincidental. Blind to complexities, this is a touchy-feely film that wouldn’t recognize an honest emotion if one hit it like a truck. Those, however, whom “Love Story” struck as realistic and who think Oscars ought to be handed out for “Reach Out and Touch Someone” commercials will find “My Life’s” brand of synthetic bathos uncannily familiar.

Starring Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman, “My Life’s” story of a man who discovers he is dying while his wife is expecting their first child should probably be approached less in anger than in sorrow. There may well be decent ideas buried somewhere in this self-satisfied morass, but they have been so suffocated by wave after wave of glibness and manipulation that nothing is left but a pale outline not unlike the ones that surround corpses at crime scenes.

“My Life,” written and directed by “Ghost” screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin, clearly thinks it is dealing with the real stuff here, with big-picture questions about the meaning of existence and the power of death. But all its thoughts are unrelievedly on the nose, all its insights thoroughly predigested. And it so milks the painful situations it evokes that one doesn’t know whether to laugh, take offense or shrug and move on.

Certainly high-powered Los Angeles public-relations executive Bob Jones (Keaton) seems powerfully uncomfortable confronting emotions as he sits looking at a video camera. “I’m supposed to be dying,” he says. “I have a disease called cancer. You’re about to be born.”

What Bob is doing is creating a tape for his expected child so the youngster knows both what Dad was like and how to master a variety of real-world skills. Sounds like a nice idea, and while Keaton’s performance certainly encourages us to see Jones as a decent sort, we soon learn, in the first of “My Life’s” arbitrary inconsistencies, that we are wrong. He has, it seems, committed the key sin of modern times: He has led an unexamined life and, yes, shut himself off from his potential for growth. For shame, Bob, for shame.

Not that Bob’s angelic wife, Gail (Kidman), would think of getting angry about any of this, even when Bob says he is too busy to accompany her to their baby’s next sonogram. A dewy-eyed domestic Mother Teresa, Gail fights back with the movie’s sappiest dialogue. “Bob, please love us,” she says at one point, adding later, “Don’t open your heart to a machine. I feel like I’ve already lost you. I need you.”

Also needing Bob are his parents and about-to-be-married brother back home in Detroit, an insistently ethnic clan of Ukrainian-Americans that have kept the family name Ivanovich that Bob has thoughtlessly discarded. Apparently still cranky over a childhood misery recounted in “My Life’s” brief prologue, Bob is on the outs with his folks. Truth is, if it weren’t for Gail (the woman is a saint), he wouldn’t be in touch with them at all.

While early press notes refer to the existence of a spiritual guide to help lead Bob out of this swamp of self-interest, that character has apparently been dropped and the burden of enlightening Bob fallen to the enigmatic Mr. Ho (Haing S. Ngor of “The Killing Fields”), a mysterious master of undefined Asian medicine.

Though Bob is initially skeptical of Mr. Ho’s abilities, he is won over by the blinding white light he sees during treatment and by Mr. Ho’s apparently inexhaustible supply of fortune cookie wisdom. Forget the cancer, Bob, Mr. Ho insists, your real illness is your anger. “It is not enough to marry goodness,” he says (oh, that Gail), “you have to find it within yourself.” And when Bob complains of an unsuccessful mission of forgiveness to Detroit, Mr. Ho reminds him, “Only one place you need to go--your heart.” Too true.

Most of “My Life” (rated PG-13 for mature subject matter) details the parallel exaltation of Bob’s spirit as his body decays, and if that sounds too pat, you have no idea. In its relentless Hollywoodization of what in most people’s lives would be an agonizing situation, this film actually makes death look like a negligible price to pay for the spiritual wealth gained by opening up and becoming a caring human being.

First-time director Rubin, who thinks lines like “kids need to marinate in love” should be read with a straight face, pulls out some stops in the film’s final half-hour that the pen cannot do justice to. It’s enough to note that when Gail says, admittedly in another context, “I think I’m going to throw up,” there will be little doubt about how she feels.

‘My Life’

Michael Keaton: Bob Jones Nicole Kidman: Gail Jones Bradley Whitford: Paul Queen Latifah: Theresa Michael Constantine: Bill Rebecca Schull: Rose

A Jerry Zucker production, in association with Capella Films released by Columbia Pictures. Director Bruce Joel Rubin. Producers Jerry Zucker, Bruce Joel Rubin, Hunt Lowry. Executive producers Gil Netter. Screenplay Bruce Joel Rubin. Cinematographer Peter James. Editor Richard Chew. Costumes Judy Ruskin. Music John Barry. Production design Neil Spisak. Art director Larry Fulton. Set decorator Anne D. McCulley. Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13 (mature subject matter).