Life Itself

Directed by Dan Fogelman

Starring – Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, Annette Bening

The Plot – As a young New York couple (Isaac, Wilde) goes from college romance to marriage and the birth of their first child, the unexpected twists of their journey create reverberations that echo over continents and through lifetimes within Life Itself.

Rated R for adult language including sexual references, some violent images and brief drug use

POSITIVES

– Immersive shot composition. While I had loads of problems with this film’s psychology overall, one thing that can’t be debated is Dan’s visual compass for depicting these very tender moments. He uses a lot of soft lighting to compliment the very intimate and claustrophobic angles, and what this does is not only engage us into the atmosphere of this loving couple, but also forces us to focus on a particular facial reaction that is played for an entirely different reaction the more we know about the story. It’s about the only dose of warmth and compassion that you will get from this film, and it does so without feeling like a gimmick, where the characters look into the lens to speak to us directly.

– One valid performance in a field of complete trash. It’s a shame that a majority of this prestigiously stacked ensemble cast are repeatedly under-directed and ineptly utilized, but one such man in Antonio Banderas overcame all of the odds to give us a valid amount of substance to his character. Maybe it’s saying something bad when Antonio Banderas is the best actor in your film, but the sadness that haunted his eyes made for some truly gripping dialogue exchanges that were easily the highlight of the film for me.

NEGATIVES

– Protagonists? These are insulting lead characters, who go for personable in their sarcastically naive deliveries, but it comes across more as dastardly unsympathetic when you really break it down. This film accomplished the insurmountable task of making me hate an Oscar Isaac character, in all of his rude and obnoxious communication that wears itself out after five minutes. He is only topped by Olivia Cooke’s emotionally vapid drone of a human being, who feels like she could accomplish more if she were dead. These are the kind of characters you don’t want to spend 108 minutes with, and you’re reminded of it redundantly, each time the story reboots itself to a new subplot. Hell is repetition.

– Minimal plot. In writing the synopsis up top, I squeezed a martini from sand. In general, this film has no plot. It’s a derivatively wretched country song of human misery that never has the capability of building an inch of momentum for itself, ridding itself of positivity the same way a cat does with fleas. What’s even worse is because it’s one of those stitched together films, with new additions every twenty minutes, the film never allows you the comfort in getting settled with what little develops. It’s every bit as forgettable as it is crass.

– Aims for a bigger picture in life meaning, but never earns what it doesn’t stride for. I compare the material enclosed to a depressed teenager who claims their life is over, but then turns their thought process around when they get a new Iphone, and I say this because ‘Life Itself’ is a constant self-wallowing mess that misses the beauty in the true spontaneity of life. Its grief and despair vastly overshadows those fast-forwarded moments of light that feel like the proper nourishment during a film that otherwise starves us of what we need to balance it out.

– To a certain degree, this film, as well as Fogelman’s writing, feels sadistic. It’s a word that I don’t often use in critiquing films, but how else can you describe a man who inevitably sets his characters up for doom in the most unapologetic of ways. Fogelman would want you to believe this accurately depicts life, but the overly-exaggerated depiction feels so unfamiliar from our own world, that it gives it this feeling of an emerging villain. Death from the Final Destination series of films doesn’t have shit on life in ‘Life Itself’.

– Television quality. This film proves to me what I already knew about Fogelman as a writer; he feels better suited for the television world of pacing that appropriately allows a writer to spread those impactful moments out. That’s not to say that Dan hasn’t made good movies, it’s just that with the recent success of his award-winning TV show “This Is Us”, it’s clear to spot where to compartmentalize his style of writing. In particularly, it’s in the redundancy of events so closely stitched together to ever allow us a welcome period of breath. Because of such, if you want to see this film, just don’t see it in theaters. Allow yourself the decency of being able to pause in between material that never relents for all of the wrong reasons.

– We get it!!!. This film has such an erection for the concept of unreliable narrator, bringing it up every five minutes, that it often feels like Fogelman just discovered this conveniently placed plot device. What’s funny is that his inclusion of the perk doesn’t enhance the dramatic pulse, nor does it satisfyingly surprise us in any method. As mentioned above, the bigger moments of this film are those sadistic ones, and nothing ever feels remotely satisfying because of such. Then there’s the problem with Fogelman’s definition of characters in an unreliable narrative that don’t match up even closely to what’s depicted front-and-center here. These characters are too bluntly honest to ever be unreliable, and it’s probably the only time in film that I wish I were lied to.

– Disjointed and contrived. This film is told in four different chapters from four different character’s perspectives, and this angle of storytelling doesn’t work here in the way it does other films because that connection feels between the arcs feels coincidental at best. When you divide this film into two halves, it often feels like you’re watching two completely different films, even two completely different languages, and that imbalance constantly asks us to start over before we have received closure from the previous offering. Because you’re dividing this film into quarters, none of the subplots ever receive ample enough time to feel properly effective, nor does their allowance of time ever feel remotely equal to what necessarily required more development.

– How did this end up being the script approved final ending? It’s clear that the intention is to go for something sweet and metaphorical, but these closing developments are truly morbid when you take even ten seconds to truly think about it, and dissect how awkward this family’s gatherings will really be when their two sides come together. Also, it’s kind of a betrayal of its material when said big message is told through the Spanish speaking characters in English, when the entire rest of the movie they spoke in Spanish, with subtitles being displayed underneath. It’s not a big deal creatively, it just doesn’t apply to what we already knew about one of these characters in particular, in that she was born, raised, and only spoke in her native language.

2/10

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