Me Myself I (R, 2000)

Rachel Griffiths (Oscar nominee for Hilary & Jackie) plays Pamela Drury, a harried 30-something magazine writer who wonders if she made a mistake, 13 years earlier, when she turned down a marriage proposal from Robert (David Roberts). She gets a chance to find out when she is hit by a car driven by none other than herself, the Pamela who married Robert and who is now living in the suburbs with husband, three children, and a dog. The second Pamela disappears, leaving Pamela One to cope with assorted domestic crises. But she begins to warm to family life. Things are more complicated than she thought, though. As Pamela One, she met an attractive and sympathetic teacher named Ben (Sandy Winton), who tells her he once thought of being a journalist, and who dashes her hopes of romance when she sees him with a wife and children. As Pamela Two, she meets him in his other incarnation, now a single journalist who never got over the death of his first love.

As in Groundhog Day or It's a Wonderful Life, the main character gets a different perspective on his/her life, and gets a second chance to make it work. But this situation has some special poignance because it relates to the central conflict of many women's lives -- and many men's, too -- the balance between work and family. Pamela's struggle, as Pam Two, to make her writing assignment into something meaningful about the modern woman, is a metaphor for her experience. So is her Pam Two nightie, with "Tic Toc Tic" on the front.

What Pam learns from experiencing her "what if" helps to turn her from someone who recites affirmations to herself every morning to someone who truly learns to value herself enough to connect to someone else. ME MYSELF I opens with young girls telling us their dreams -- fashion designer, supermodel, wife and mother. Pam asks her own daughter (well, Pam Two's daughter) about her dreams, but she is content for the moment to be open to everything.