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| photo courtesy of ritz3cinema.com |
Dan Fogelman, creator
of the popular TV show This is Us,
wrote and directed Life Itself. The
movie stars an ensemble cast: Olivia Wilde, Oscar Isaac, Olivia Cooke, Laia
Costa, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Antonio Banderas, and Alex Monner, among others. Like
This is Us, Life Itself tells an intergenerational story about romance,
hardship, and finding the strength to persevere.
Life Itself
certainly has plenty of story. Although the movie’s trailers center mostly on
one pair of characters, it actually tells four different (intersecting)
stories, each one with its own set of characters, setting, and storyline. Yet
for all its narrative footwork, Life
Itself has surprisingly little substance. Many of its constituent pieces
are passable—some genuinely powerful—but as a whole, it ultimately tries to say
too little with way, way too much.
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| photo courtesy of variety.com |
The target demographic
(people who ugly-cry during This Is Us,
I assume) may find what they’re looking for in Life Itself. It rings all the right bells, hits all the right cues,
plays all the right sappy music. But even fanatics may get more than they
bargained for here. In one sense, literally: this movie goes on way too long,
with a decidedly unhurried pace. In another sense, they may find that Life Itself’s incredibly bleak outlook isn’t
exactly a picker-upper.
As per expectations, the
action concludes on a high note, with a hopeful musing about the meaning of *ahem*
life itself. The previous two hours of film, however, do little to reinforce the
positive message. Sure, it’s got plenty of melodramatic, slow-mo montages where
lovers giggle with guitars play softly in the background. But it punctuates
each of these moments with a gut punch—something depressing and often
horrifying to watch. This, the movie tells us, is what life is like. It’s a
balancing act. Maybe so in life, but not in Life
Itself, where the filmmakers present hardship with such scrupulous detail…
only to capriciously (and highly coincidentally) assert a cheery worldview in
the last few minutes. The tonal imbalance makes Life Itself’s ending feel trite and unearned.
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| photo courtesy of hollywoodoutbreak.com |
It seems a bit full of
itself, too. It employs stylistic oddities on several occasions—colorful interjections
in the storytelling. They’re innocuous and sometimes pleasant, but they’re inconsistent.
One such scene, which opens the film, is a scene I would draw a big red X over
if I read it in an intro-screenwriting class: unnecessary, incongruous. More to
the point, Life Itself relies heavily
on sappy, overwrought montages. One or two can be effective emotional outlets,
but by the third and fourth, it just seems like the movie’s getting high on its
own supply. And in many places, the movie is dreadfully on-the-nose. At one
point, for instance, Life Itself
explicitly compares itself to Bob Dylan. By the time the credits roll, the
experience has compounded into one big, terribly unsubtle mess.
TRAILER
Watch the trailer here.
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| photo courtesy of elitedaily.com |
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