Life Itself (2018)

Director Lars Van Trier is my go to joke about bleakness in film but it seems like writer/director Dan Fogelman is gunning for the position. The creator of This is Us has jumped to the big screen with his awkwardly humerous treatise on morbidity and death, Life Itself. The opening of the film seems almost clever, for a moment, before it starts to fall apart in front of our eyes. So much of the film feels that way. It is like there is a good idea there (in this case the idea of exploring the unreliable narrator) which then gets abandoned for something schmaltzy yet strangely icky at the same time.

Fogelman appears to be attempting to be the romcom Tarantino and even references him explicitly a number of times throughout. Like Tarantino, Fogelman develops intricate and fascinating back stories for each of his characters giving us a story in a story in a story. But unlike Tarantino, who then gives his characters something to do, Fogelman abandons the characters as soon as their backstory is explained. For Oscar Isaac's character (the movie is sold on him as the star but he's only in it briefly) it is literally all about his back story and then he is ripped from us gratuitously.

Gratuitous is a very good word to describe all that is going on in Life Itself. Characters and ideas are presented and the ripped from us before they can have any real meaning. And it's all to get to this weird place at the end of identity and connection which falls completely flat due to how little identity and connection was able to be woven into this script due to its harshness.

Life Itself feels like it's an idea of a story instead of a story. Like it's a pantomime of realism instead of realism. There are many moments that seem filled with possibility which just get shut down before they can blossom. It's a Hallmark movie shown on the big screen.

Life Itself
Starring: Oscar Isaac, Annette Benning, Olivia Wilde, Mandy Patinkin, Oliva Cooke, Laia Costa, Antonio Banderas, Alex Monner, Jean Smart, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Samuel L. Jackson
Writer/Director: Dan Fogelman