Movie Review - Life Itself (2018)

Writer-director Dan Fogelman is an Emmy nominee for his hit TV series This is Us. That NBC series follows a single family over the course of three generations, following its tragedies, its lovers and its diversifying. The series depicts the various generations concurrently, so it's constantly jumping back-and-forth in time. One scene would be in the 1980's. The next will be in the present. Then, the next will be in the future and then the next will be back in the past. This film depicts the various generations sequentially and for the most part in a linear fashion. It's similar to Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines (2013), but Cianfrance focused exclusively on fathers and sons. Fogelman does fathers and sons and grandsons or granddaughters and arguably even great granddaughters.

Because Fogelman doesn't have a dozen or so hours of television-time to tell the stories of those, three generations of family, a lot has to be compressed or skipped to fit it all into less than the two hours here. Fogelman uses a few tricks to accomplish this. The most annoying trick is the voice-over narration. The first use of it is cute, but afterwards it gets to be real clunky and overbearing.

What also doesn't help is in the compression of the narrative, something is lost in the characterizations. The characters in fact don't feel like fleshed-out, human beings but rather pieces on a checkerboard being moved from beat-to-beat, not because the plot is so compelling or important but because Fogelman needs to trudge to the next chapter, almost as if he doesn't care about his characters, which I'm sure isn't true, but he's cramming. He's cramming so many of these characters together that it can feel like he doesn't care.

At the same time, Fogelman is trying to make this grander point about humanity that comes across as so highfalutin but in actuality is a drug-induced, college thesis that was probably slapped together. The main idea is that Fogelman is deconstructing the unreliable narrator as a literary device or in this case a cinematic device. First, Fogelman bashes us over the head with that device, a device that has been utilized by filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino whom Fogelman references not only by name and with the use of chapters, but by using one of Tarantino's favorite actors, Samuel L. Jackson.

Using Jackson is audacious and bold and is meant to be comedic, one of several comedic moments where the unreliable narrator shtick is implemented. It's just that those moments are so over-the-top and feel so out-of-place when pitted against the serious issues at play like mental illness, suicide, trauma, loss, abandonment and cancer. Fogelman injects comedy and humor in This is Us opposite its serious, subject matter but subtle and nuanced comedy on that TV series is replaced with sledgehammer swings here. One such example is a joke made about Natalie Portman. It's a meta-joke given who makes the joke, but it just is like a sledgehammer to the face the way it's delivered here.

Oscar Isaac (Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Ex Machina) stars as Will Dempsey, a writer who is in therapy and it's his character who references Portman. First, Isaac and Portman were both in Star Wars movies. Both were even in a movie together earlier this year called Annihilation, so him referencing her is meant to be funny, but the way it comes across is just too much. He's meant to be sympathetic because of what he experiences and because he might have a mental illness, but Isaac embodies Will as such a jerk from which the movie never really lets him recover.

The movie dispatches with him rather quickly. It bypasses also rather quickly the female characters like Olivia Wilde (House and The O.C.) as Abby, the love interest of Will, and Olivia Cooke (Ready Player One and Bates Motel) as Dylan, the daughter of Will and Abby. Dylan is mostly a stereotype who exists as a bridge to get us to what might be the best part of this film but still frustrating.

Antonia Banderas (Puss in Boots and The Mask of Zorro) co-stars as Vincent Saccione, a half-Italian man who lives in Spain and who owns an olive farm. He delivers a long and amazing speech, a monologue about how he inherited the land and his distance from his father. He's a lonely man who becomes impressed with one of his workers named Javier González, played by Sergio Peris-Mencheta. Vincent also becomes taken with Javier's family, eventually falling in love with Javier's family.

Yet, the movie doesn't feel the need to spend more time with this family. I would have preferred a TV series of Vincent and Javier because this movie suffers from not having more time to linger. As such, the character of Javier is dispatched. The movie doesn't allow enough time for him to be redeemed or explain an act he commits that removes him from the story. Fogelman simply passes the torch to Àlex Monner who plays Rodrigo, the son of Javier. He's more or less a bridge too. He's there to connect some dots, but a defining traumatic event is never reconciled for him and for Dylan. Fogelman would rather wrap it all up in a nice, pretty bow.

Rated R for language including sexual references, some violent images and brief drug use.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 58 mins.