Here’s the basic plot of Life as a House: after being fired from his job and diagnosed with a terminal illness giving him less than a year to live, an affable architect takes his estranged teenage son away with him for the summer to build his dream house.
And here’s the storyline: Kevin Kline plays George, the simultaneously lonely and friendly architect who lives in a small, run-down house in the middle of a classy, seaside suburban community with huge, expensive homes.
He’s a pleasant pariah and an unobtrusive neighbor who, for example, doesn’t think it’s his fault when a neighbor’s curious daughter catches him urinating from his back yard into the ocean.
George is getting along fine until he is fired from his job. "We can put models on the computer and make hundreds of changes instantly," he is told by his boss. "Yet you refuse to change." George has always nurtured a love of constructing his models from hand.
After a contrived temper tantrum and a few gasps of breath, George is promptly led away to the emergency room where he is told that he has less than half a year left to live.
Focus then shifts to George's ex-wife, Robin, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, who is trapped in a loveless marriage, and Robin and George's out-of-control, angst-ridden son, Sam, played by Hayden Christensen (whose upcoming portrayal of Anakin Skywalker will make him a household name).
The rest of the movie consists of Sam being taken away from his frustrated parents for the summer by George, wishing to make the best of the last moments in his life by reconnecting with his son. George's dream house, the one he has been talking about building all of his life but never got around to, is the excuse he uses to take Sam with him.
The last word: The film tries a little hard to imitate American Beauty. It is as manipulative and packed with cliches as a movie can come, but it does have a lot of heart. The true beauty of this film are the actors.
The script is awkwardly written, but each of the actors does a good job of making you like them and genuinely care what happens to them.
If there were a soundtrack CD for the film, it would probably be a nice buy.
There are plenty of scenes with vast oceanic views and plaintive sunset skies, accompanied by an appealing musical score.
Life as a House presents a nice message. We see people confronting painful realities and ending up being the better for it.
We see the lonely, likeable George realizing just in the nick of time that the simple things in life are so important and so easy to ignore, like love within a family.
"I always thought of myself as a house," George tells his son, near the film's end.
And even after he is gone, the edifice is still standing tall.
Grade: B-
R, 2 hours, 4 minutes
