Review: Mitch Albom’s For One More Day (DVD)

There is a solid audience for Oprah Winfrey-produced films, and I realize Mitch Albom has a following thanks to his early works like The Five People You Meet In Heaven and Tuesdays With Morrie. However, even among folks who normally like this sort of thing, including my wife, Mitch Albom’s For One More Day is both annoying and snooze-inducing. In fact, I dozed lightly a couple times watching it and my wife almost needed GPS tracking to lure me back to the land of the wide awake.

The story revolves around a washed up baseball player who has screwed up his life and his relationship with his family so badly, he’s at the verge of committing suicide; but just as he is about to pull the trigger, he sees his mother, nine years dead, looking on from the other side of a Little League diamond.

As the title predicts, he gets to spend “one more day” with his mom, who takes him on a sort of “Ghost of Christmas Past” journey of his life, ala “A Christmas Carol,” to see what an utter piece of doo-doo he’d been to his mom throughout his life, because he was so eager to please his emotionally distant dad.

The cast offers little to speak of in the way of allure. Ellyn Burstyn is the biggest name in the cast, although 1980s starlet Samantha Mathis, made mildly famous in the movie Dream A Little Dream, suddenly re-emerges from obscurity to play a younger, early-40s version of this guy’s mom.

While Albom has mixed sentimentality well in the past, and the book may be more effective, the movie is plodding and ponderous and about as riveting as watching paint dry. Also, I just don’t follow the logic of the movie; his mom’s ghost is there to convince him not to kill himself, and does this by … showing him what an ass he’s been all these years? Way to motivate a fellow that life’s worth living, huh?

The DVD is short on extras, but it’s not the sort of film most folks will want to spend extra time with. If you’re an Albom fan, I’d say pick up his novels and start reading, or if you must see Albom’s work on film, rent Tuesdays With Morrie instead. For One More Day is, for this reviewer, one day too many.