Mark Reviews Movies: LIFE ITSELF (2018)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 20, 2018

The obvious twists and allegedly shocking revelations start almost immediately in Life Itself, an elaborately convoluted melodrama about multiple generations of one, really unlucky family. The movie begins with a gag, in which Samuel L. Jackson provides the narration that introduces us to a pair of characters, neither of whom really matters in this story. Get used to that concept.

The joke is that Jackson exists as an explicitly unreliable narrator within an attempted screenplay by yet another character who seems vital to the story, only to be almost immediately forgotten once he exits the tale. Director Dan Fogelman's screenplay does that trick a lot here, and for some reason, he thinks that the conceit is going to keep surprising us all the way through at least six separate shifts in the narrative's protagonist.

From a storytelling perspective, it's a bad decision, because we don't have enough time to care about any of the assorted, tragic stories of these characters, who really exist only to have tragedy befall them and to become pawns in some twisted game of fate. After a while, we stop trying to care, too, because the movie keeps playing the same game over and over again. If you fool me once, shame on you. If you try to fool me five more times, please, could you just stop it already?

It grows tiresome, especially since Fogelman expends his quota for overblown catastrophe at the end of the movie's first chapter (but, nonetheless, really piles it on at the beginning of the second). Yes, this is one of those movies that's divided into chapters, for reasons that seem pretentious at first but turn out to be blandly utilitarian. Every chapter gives us a new main character, whose story becomes the focus. Within a few of those chapters, there are multiple main characters, whose stories are meant to have equal importance to the primary character of that chapter. People are all tied together in strange and mysterious ways by this thing called life, you see, because every seemingly random event leads to another and makes life an unpredictable journey.

This is the central theme, stated repeatedly by at least two characters. One of them, by the way, actually goes so far as to write a thesis about how life itself is the most unreliable of narrators. By an additional way, that thesis is rejected by the character's professor. It's not because it doesn't make a lick of sense. It's because the idea is too smart. Never trust an overarching theory about the meaning and purpose of life made by a screenwriter who has his own characters pat him on the back for his cleverness.

To detail the various threads of story, time, and how these characters fit together would be futile and, unfortunately, unfair, since Fogelman would rather obscure important information for a cheap twist than to give us any sort of grounding for this story. At first, it's about Will (Oscar Isaac), a man who recently has been released from a mental institution after his wife Abby (Olivia Wilde) left him six months prior.

Just within this section of the story, we get a manipulative game about what really happened, as Will talks to his therapist (played by Annette Bening) about his and Abby's marriage, the sad and grisly deaths of Abby's parents, and the day that Abby left. The language here is intentionally vague to such an extent that we can figure out what happened almost immediately, and in retrospect, it certainly reframes that fake-out sequence at the beginning as one done in really bad taste.

To go further than this would wreck Fogelman's falsely intricate and ultimately straightforward narrative. The prospect is tempting, but instead, here are some vague details: We meet Dylan (Olivia Cooke), whose life began with tragedies that haven't let up since. We travel to Spain to meet Mr. Saccione (Antonio Banderas), who also has a tale of woe, and his employee Javier (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), whose life is too simple for misfortune until he marries Isabel (Laia Costa) and has a son. That's when a whole lot of tragic events occur for the entire clan and previous calamities replay from a new perspective.

It's all so overwhelming—not emotionally, mind you, but more in the vein of an irritating itch that you just can't reach. The cast members do what they can with the material, and thankfully, there are talented people here who know to downplay their performances. After all, Life Itself isn't their show. It belongs to Fogelman, whose filmmaking is hammy enough.

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