Life as a House

Life as a House (2001) is openly sentimental family drama and shows you its shape inside twenty minutes. George has worked at the same architecture firm for twenty years and is fired. On the same day he is diagnosed with cancer. He decides to spend his last summer doing two things: demolishing the shack his father left him and building a house on the site, and taking in the teenage son he has lost touch with. The house is an obvious metaphor and the film does not hide it. What is being built is the relationship. The risk in this kind of story is melodrama and the film falls into it more than once. Against that, Kevin Kline plays a dying man without asking to be pitied. He is angry, stubborn and frequently unpleasant. Hayden Christensen is here before Star Wars and genuinely carries his half. There are too many subplots: the neighbour, the ex wife, the teenagers. Some of the 125 minutes dissolves there. Good for: father and son stories, unashamedly emotional drama, and films that set out to make you cry. Less good for: drug use, teenage prostitution and a death. Anyone wanting restraint will find it heavy handed, and you know the ending from the start.