Sarah Polley is an amazing actress, one of my very favorites, but her selection of roles has been dour to say the least: from Nicole, the knowing wheelchair girl in Atom Egoyan's "Sweet Hereafter" to Maren Hontvedt, the morose Dutch immigrant who murders her sister and sister-in-law in Kathryn Bigelow's "The Weight Of Water," Polley has enjoyed a career built on suffering. She can be seen in Thom Fitzgerald's melodrama "The Event" (opening October 3) where she plays a bereaved sister whose beloved older brother has died of AIDS. We've also seen Polley party before the end of the world ("Last Night"), watch her alcoholic lover's teeth fall out ("Guinevere"), hold her consumptive mother's hand and witness her father burn to death ("The Claim"), not to mention get run over in a parking lot after an Ecstasy deal gone bad ("Go.")
But all of these tragic parts pale in comparison to the role of Ann in "My Life Without Me." A working class woman with two young daughters and a sweet but unreliable husband, Ann lives with her family in a tiny trailer and cleans (rather than attend) the local university at night. After collapsing one day, Ann goes for a medical check up to find out a lethal cancer is spreading rapidly through her body.
