Life as a House

Reviewed by:
Eric Alt

Put this in your lightsaber and smoke it: Life as a House is the first major big screen appearance of Hayden Christensen, the boy who will be Anakin Skywalker in Episode 2: Attack of the Clones and Episode 3: Clone Alone. So what’s your first impression of the young Vader? How about a blue-haired punk whose morning ritual is whip-its and autoerotic asphyxiation? Take that, Mark Hamill.

Apart from Darth Vader’s penchant for also hustling blow jobs, Life as a House tells the story of a bitter, divorced architect (Kevin Kline) who discovers he’s dying and attempts to rebuild his waterfront house before the lights go out permanently. If the metaphor were any more obvious, the title of the movie would have been A Man Who’s Life is a Mess Rebuilds it Brick By Brick So He Can Die in Peace. The emotions are about as subtle as the “objective correlative” (that’s a pretentious film term to describe an object in a movie that’s a physical manifestation of the protagonist’s internal struggle—we didn’t waste all of our education), making Life as a House the kind of weepy melodrama most often found on the Lifetime channel and starring Meredith Baxter-Birney. While Kline, Christensen, and Kristin Scott Thomas (as the ex-wife) deliver strong performances, the movie is just too sappy to live.

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