Griffiths, an Eye for Detail Help Redeem ‘Me Myself I’

The moment you hear single, 30ish investigative journalist Pamela Drury (Rachel Griffiths), the doughty, disaffected heroine of “Me Myself I,” complain to one of her stroller-pushing buddies about the tick-tick-tick of her biological clock, you feel this overwhelming need to reach for a remote control button. Even those who identify strongly with Pamela’s anxiety will roll their eyes and wonder if there’s a game on somewhere. Anything, in short, that they haven’t seen many times, many ways before.

Since there’s no way to change the channel on a theatrical release, you then sigh and wonder how or whether writer-director Pip Karmel can apply a different spin on this situation. It comes after a grim survey of living alone and hating it in contemporary Sydney. Put another way, it comes after Pam dates a loser on her birthday, weeps over turning down a marriage proposal from one Robert Dickson (David Roberts) some 13 years before, finds out her dream guy is already taken and attempts suicide only to be foiled by a power failure.

The next morning, a car blindsides Pam as she’s crossing the street. When she wakes up, she finds that the driver is . . . Pamela Drury. Only it’s a Pamela Drury who said yes to Robert and ended up in a cozy suburban house with two small boys and a teenage girl. Soon, the Pamela who was hit by a car finds herself the only Pamela in the house. She’s not dead, she’s not dreaming and now she has to help the youngest child wipe his bottom.

You just know from the start that what follows is going to be one roller coaster of a learning experience for Pam and her alternate-universe household. And once again, you wonder: How is this fish-out-of-water-lifestyle-wish-fulfillment fantasy any different from what you’ve seen a million times before on prime-time TV?

There are a couple of answers to this question, beginning with Griffiths herself. To say that Karmel is fortunate to have her in the lead is understating matters greatly. At once supremely confident and winsomely vulnerable, Griffiths’ Pam holds your attention without any gratuitous mannerisms or broad asides. It’s a sleek, rangy performance that all but redeems the hackneyed familiarity of the premise.

The other thing “Me Myself I” has going for it is a beguiling attention to detail in many of the domestic sequences. There’s a near-disorienting yet engaging intimacy, for instance, in the scenes between Pam and her moody 14-year-old daughter (Yael Stone) when the latter gets her first period. (Gratifyingly little is made of the fact that Pam finds herself saying the exact same thing to the daughter that her own mother said to her at the same biological moment.) The love scenes between Pam and Robert likewise conclude with a satisfying ambivalence. (She’s not sure what to think of it all, except that she thinks she still loves him.)

And one supposes that there are more than a few in the audience who will be helped along by the film’s message: If you want to change your life, the best thing to do is imagine yourself in somebody else’s. Perhaps a movie made less slickly than “Me Myself I” could have made this point seem fresher than it does here. But who knows whether anyone would have wanted to see it?

* MPAA rating: R, for sexuality and some language. Times guidelines: Both the sexuality and the language are fairly tame.

‘Me Myself I’

Rachel Griffiths: Pamela Drury

David Roberts: Robert Dickson

Sandy Winton: Ben

Yael Stone: Stacey

A Sony Pictures Classics release of a Gaumont Production. Director Pip Karmel. Producer Fabien Liron. Screenplay by Pip Karmel. Cinematographer Graham Lind. Editor Denise Haratzis. Costume designers Paul Warren and Ariane Weiss. Production designer Murray Picknett. Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes.

At selected theaters.