`Life' asks us to make peace with past before it's too late

The Boston Herald

November 28, 1993 Beverly Beckham

It isn't a flawless movie, but it's powerful. "My Life" is about a man, diagnosed with terminal cancer, who decides to make a video for his unborn child so the child will know his father.

The man, who has about four months to live, sets a camera on a tripod, sits in front of it and talks, hesitantly at first, uncomfortable before the mechanical eye.

After a while, the process gets easier and he begins to record everything. He reads a Dr. Seuss book to his unborn son. He teaches him to shave. He demonstrates the correct way to walk into a room, not self-consciously but with confidence.

He philosophizes about the Beatles, reminisces about his childhood, and talks about exactly when and where he fell in love.

Away from the camera, the dying man isn't open at all. He doesn't know himself and no one knows him. To his employees he's a rich businessman, to his friend a competitive racquetball player, to his wife a man who's more comfortable with jokes than conversation. Only because of the legacy that he's leaving for his child does he begin to look at his life for the first time.

There is, of course, the requisite family conflict. Where there is family there is always conflict. Though this man now lives in the hills of L.A., 2,000 miles from his old Detroit home, though he thinks he has nothing in common with his blue-collar roots and has severed ties with his past, it is still a big part of him.

His wife is his steady connection. She phones his parents. She tells them what's happening in their lives and they tell her what's happening in theirs. His brother is getting married. But it is only because he is dying that he agrees to return home for the wedding. He sees the event as an opportunity to get his entire family on videotape for his unborn child.

He doesn't tell his family he is ill. He holds himself back from his parents and his brother the whole time he is there.

After the wedding, in his parents' house, the old grievances surface. "You ran away from home because you were ashamed of us. You were always ashamed of us," his father says.

"I didn't run away. I moved."

"You moved! So why do you ignore us? Why don't you call?"

"Why don't you call? I've been in L.A. for 10 years and you've never seen my business or my home."

"Your mother doesn't fly. You know that."

"You've never heard of buses and trains?"

And on it goes, the you-did-this-to-me and you-said-that-to-me and you-don't-understand litany of hurts that families know so well, old wounds wrapped in the same old words, repeated again and again and again.

Father and son sit across from one another and, though they love each other, they remain separated by years of pride and misunderstandings and grievances that are as hurtful as barbed wire.

At the movie's end, father and son are poignantly reconciled. "You never did anything wrong, Dad. It was me," the dying man says as his father sits by his bed.

"I love you," the father tells his son.

"I love you, too." the son replies.

You watch this and you shake your head and maybe you cry a little because this isn't fiction up on the big screen. It's the real-life story of so many people's lives.

"I'm sorry I wasn't always there for you," a man who is dying of cancer tells his daughter. "I should have been a better father."

"You are now," she replies. "That's what matters."

This man and his daughter reconciled. But so many people who are estranged remain estranged, though the reasons they no longer speak no longer exist.

"She never visited our mother. Never sent her cards on Mother's Day. Never called. She couldn't be bothered with her then and I can't be bother with her now."

"There was never any pleasing him. Nothing I did was ever good enough so I decided a long time ago to stop trying."

"You are a good father now," my friend told her father. She has stopped letting the past get in the way of now.

People are human. They make mistakes. Friends disappoint. Children mess up. Parents let you down.

But life goes on and people grow. It's the hardest thing in the world to watch them growing apart, when you know that underneath the hurt and anger and old grudges that separate them, there is a core of undying and forgiving love.