![[box cover]](../../reviewimgs/m/memyselfandi.jpg)
Me Myself I
The late '90s saw a vogue for a new brand of "what if" films in which a woman was given an opportunity to see, George Bailey like, how her life would have turned out if she had made different decisions. Sliding Doors and Passion of Mind were just two films with this same premise, while Me Myself I was one of the better entries in this meager genre, a brand of film seemingly inspired by millennial fever, but which also is an off-shoot of a standard but recently revivified variation on the female weepie in which a contemporary young woman masochistically whines about her life and relationships (Party Girl, Next Stop Wonderland, countless others). Like the other films in the life-switching genre, Me Myself I makes no effort to explain just how the central character comes to magically transform her life. It just is. This can be very annoying and distracting to literal-minded viewers who want to have such things made plausible, or at least explained. Instead, Pamela Drury (Rachel Griffiths), a single, award-winning journalist, is in a funk, thinking that she has misspent her life. She wonders if she would have been more content if she'd married the first man who proposed to her (David Roberts). But suddenly after a car accident there are two Pamelas, and this one finds herself in the very domestic situation that she has been wondering about, only none of it is as she might have expected. There are noisy, demanding, ungrateful kids and a husband with a wandering eye. We don't know this for a while in the narrative, but the Pamela she has replaced has entered her life and is exploring the freedom that Pamela #1 enjoys. Finally, after a broad learning experience, the two Pamelas meet up again and go back renewed to their original lives. Where all of this is happening is, of course, never explained, but presumably there is a parallel universe in which we all have totally different existences, which we can visit in times of crisis. Me Myself I is a fairly good movie, despite its inexplicable premise, and should enjoy a long life on the Lifetime Channel. Columbia TriStar's DVD edition of Australian director Pip Karmel's 1999 film comprises a good anamorphic transfer (1.85:1) and audio in Dolby Digital 5.1 or DD 2.0 Surround. Commentary by Karmel, who touches on several topics, talent files, trailer. Keep-case.
—D.K. Holm
