Your life itself deserves better than this trite, facile disaster
I’m trying to come up with one kind thing to say about Life Itself, the new movie from writer/director Dan Fogelman, creator of television’s weep-inducing phenom This is Us, and all I can come up with is, boy, Oscar Isaac sure is nice to look at. When one of the film’s characters proclaims outright, “This is some deep philosophical shit,” you know you’re in trouble. Fogelman commits the cardinal screenwriting sin of telling (and over and over and over, mind you) rather than showing, and the result is a cringe-inducing, treacly, overwrought mess of a picture that even This is Us fans will do well to avoid.
A multi-generational saga that spans continents, Life Itself hits you over the head repeatedly with its premise that while life (or “life itself,” a phrase uttered by characters seemingly non-stop) is random, often sad, miserable, and brutal, it’s worth living, because of, you know, love. To exemplify this thesis, we follow a series of characters, all of whom deal with extreme highs and lows, because, yup, that’s… wait for it… life itself, right?
Oscar Isaac of course is the best of the bunch as Will, a New York resident newly out of a psychiatric treatment center when we meet him, in visits with his empathetic therapist (Annette Bening, wasted in a small part). What caused Will’s breakdown is revealed slowly, as per the Fogelman playbook. In flashbacks, we see him fall in love with Abby (Olivia Wilde) in college, and let it be said that, try as they might, all the hair and make up pros in the world can’t make Isaac and Wilde look remotely like fresh-faced 18-year-olds at a frat party.
The movie unfolds in five chapters, mostly titled after the main characters that the chapter story arcs follow. After the Abby/Will/therapist story, we end up in the olive orchards of Andalusia, Spain, where we meet Mr. Saccione (Antonio Banderas), the rich but lonely jefe of a large olive growing empire. He develops an affectionate, if not always equal, relationship with his quiet but thoughtful employee Javier (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), Javier’s wife Isabel (Laia Costa), and their son Rodrigo (Adrian Marrero and Alex Monner, at different ages). Much of the Spain-set section of the film is delivered in Spanish, and, as a side note, it’s telling that even though I missed about 15 minutes of the subtitles during a major monologue by Mr. Saccione, the story is so simplistic that it was easy to fill in the blanks later and figure out what had probably been said. (In my defense, I thought Fogelman was trying to be authentic; only after quite some time passed did it occur to me there probably were subtitles, and sitting more upright in my low chair allowed me to see them low on the screen… head-slap moment).
Fogelman obviously thinks that, for the audience, learning exactly how the Spain characters will intersect with the New York characters will be provocative and intriguing, but he’s mistaken. Most of the plot points we see coming a mile away (when they aren’t being explicitly spelled out for us), and the whole screenplay feels like a maudlin short story written by a dreamy 14-year-old the night before its due date. Like an eager-to-please teen, Fogelman throws in a little of everything. An opening sequence involving Samuel L. Jackson, as well as a myriad of references to Pulp Fiction, for example, just seems desperate and pretentious, as does an overreliance on Bob Dylan (one of the film’s major characters even bears his name). And scenes in which characters watch versions of themselves in other moments of their lives is ripped straight out of Annie Hall. None of these elements are fresh, and all are too precious, too meta, too derivative, and much, much too superficial.
In one particularly idiotic storyline, Fogelman has Abby write her college thesis on the “unreliable narrator,” the sole point of which seems to be to provide yet another mouthpiece for Fogelman to hit home his message that “life itself is the unreliable narrator”: we never know what’s going to happen, so seize the day, love each other fiercely, yadda, yadda, yadda. A late voice-over by the narrator (whose identity, when finally revealed, will come as no shock to even the most marginally astute viewer) about valuing life and the generations past is filled with clichéd gems that Fogelman apparently thinks are wise: “If life brings you to your knees, you get up”, “You are your father’s story — you are your mother’s story,” and other eye-rolling so-called profundities litter Fogelman’s screenplay.
This is Us fans deserve better than this insipid, shallow re-telling of Fogelman’s best ideas, and, frankly, so do all of us. Fogelman should heed his picture’s advice, pick himself up, dust himself off, and try for something better next time.
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Life Itself opens today at Bay Area theaters.
