MITCH ALBOM’S FOR ONE DAY MORE

US, 2007, 90 minutes, Colour.
Michael Imperioli, Ellen Burstyn.
Directed by Lloyd Kramer.

This film was produced by Oprah Winfrey. It was written for the screen by its author, Mitch Albom. He scored great success with the film versions of Tuesdays with Morrie and of The Five People You Meet in Heaven and Have a Little Faith.
This film does not offer as much as it intends to. The story is somewhat slight, the structure of the film confusing. It moves from one time period to another, seemingly indiscriminately.
The focus is on a baseball player who had played in the major league, suffered an injury, had to make his way in the business world, working at a job that he did not like. He began to drink and alienate himself from his wife and daughter. By the time of the final episode of the film, he is suicidal.
As with the other stories by Mitch Albom, there is a preoccupation with death and its meaning. As the player considers suicide, he glimpses his mother in the distance, follows her, spends a day with her, realising that he is dying and that the people she meets are soon to die. The meeting enables him to look back on his life, idolising his fickle father who abandoned the family for a second family, his harshness towards his mother, his alienation of his family. He decides to live.
Some years later, watching a baseball match, he meets a young reporter, tells her his story. She is his granddaughter.
Michael Imperioli, from The Sopranos, is the player. Ellen Burstyn is his mother, who is played in the flashbacks by Samantha Mathis. Direction is by Lloyd Kramer, stand-by director for a number of Oprah Winfrey produced films.

1. Mitch Albom and his reputation? Books and films? Audience expectations? A humanist approach, a spiritual approach, to death and its meaning?
2. The production values, Oprah Winfrey producer, Mitch Albom as writer.
3. The structure of the film: the variety of times, Charlie’s childhood, teenage years and college, adulthood and marriage, his sports career, failure, sales work, drinking, the suicide day, telling his story to his granddaughter? The overall effect of moving amongst so many time periods?
4. Chick as a character, idolising his father, his father and the shop, wanting him to succeed in baseball, the meals? His mother, antagonism towards her? Blaming her for her husband’s departure? Hurting her? Chick going to college, his mother with him, his embarrassment? Playing baseball? His father coming to the college, the contacts for the major league, his playing, injury, the effect? Marriage, difficulties with his wife, with his daughter? His father’s reappearance? His drinking? Suicidal, the marriage of his daughter and his not being invited, the crash, the car and the truck, with the gun?
5. His walking away, seeing his mother as he sat and contemplated shooting himself? Following her, spending the day, the old house, her preparing breakfast, his being bewildered, puzzling over her being dead? The reminiscences, the visits to friends, to Rose and his mother doing her hair, the black lady with whom she worked, the information about them, dying? His hearing the voices of the rescuers? Going with his mother to sit with the gun, her questions? Going to the car, reviving? Saved?
6. His mother, her hard life, tensions with her husband, her being a nurse, being a whistleblower, losing her job? Discovering her husband’s bigamy? Ousting him? Taking the blame in her children’s eyes? The cleaning work, hair-dressing, the life of hurt?
7. Chick seeing his wife at the funeral? leaving, the estranged daughter, no contact?
8. The granddaughter, at the baseball field, the interview? The manuscript, her corrections, seeing it as a ghost story? The end and her talking about her grandfather?
9. Chick and his father, a hard men, the war experience in Italy, heroics, having the liquor distribution shop, baseball and his son, his disappearance, his second life, with the wife and son, his reappearances, offering to help will, Chick’s disillusionment?
10. The experience of dying, life before one’s eyes, dramatised in detail here, possibilities for choice, a purgatory experience? Death or life, the consequences?