MOVIE REVIEW: ‘Life Itself’ Delivers a Wholly Unsatisfactory Barrage of Cliches and Cheap Sentiment
There’s sentiment. Then there’s cheap sentiment. And then there’s Life Itself, writer-director Dan Fogelman (Pitch, Tangled, Crazy, Stupid Love, Cars), return to multiplexes after the small-screen success of This Is Us. Fogelman doesn’t just embrace the contrivances, coincidences, and clichés of melodrama, he ruthlessly exploits them to torture an incredibly unfortunate cast of characters and callously wring every last tear from unsuspecting (and suspecting) moviegoers. In Life Itself (not to be confused with the Roger Ebert documentary), car accidents, pedestrian fatalities, and, of course, cancer, arrive with alarming regularity. No one’s immune from Fogelman’s wrath. He effectively plays a cruel, capricious god to his characters, but he’s deeply mistaken, if not outright delusional, if he imagines any of the banalities his characters utter or embrace as life lessons are anything but faux-profundities and banal insights.
The ads for Life Itself smartly put Oscar Isaac and Olivia Wilde front and center. They’re not, however, the central characters in Life Itself. Life is — or rather multiple characters share the distinction of “central character” or “protagonist,” beginning with Isaac and Wilde as star-struck, inevitably doomed lovers, Will and Abby Dempsey. Borrowing the plot gimmicks and devices he’s honed to near perfection on This Is Us, Fogelman plays the non-linear game, skipping forward, then backward, in time, mostly as Will fills in a perpetually befuddled psychiatrist, Cait Morris (Annette Bening, badly underused) on Abby’s turbulent, troubled past (e.g., dead parents, an abusive uncle) and their shared, if all too brief, relationship first as college friends-turned-lovers-turned-married-couple, the impending birth of their first child, followed by the abrupt end of their relationship (it won’t be spoiled here). To add some context, however, Will — and by extension, Fogelman — admits that Will’s romantic obsession with Abby borders on “stalker-like,” but Fogelman leaves that potentially intriguing idea completely unexplored.
As Will and Abby exit Life Itself, their punk-rock daughter Dylan (Olivia Cooke), briefly takes center stage. As a young adult, she’s prone to bursts of anger and violence — you would too if Fogelman was writing your life story — the product of a deeply unhappy childhood due to the absence of her parents. Before we can spend too much time with Dylan, we’re off to an olive farm in sun-dappled Spain and Vincent Saccione (Antonio Banderas), a wealthy, if lonely, landowner, his foreman, Javier (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), Javier’s wife, Isabel (Laia Costa), and their five-year-old-son, Rodrigo (Adrian Marrero). While there’s more than a hint of a romantic triangle between Vincent, Javier, and Isabel, it’s Rodrigo, traumatized once again by Fogelman’s heavy hand, who both binds them together, but also places in Fogelman’s sweet spot: As a young man, Rodrigo (Àlex Monner), dreams of attending New York University (NYU’s branding department, it should be added, rivals only Apple for product placement).
Fogelman embraces contrivance and coincidence almost as much as he embraces sentiment, cheap or otherwise. As tragedies mount, it becomes increasingly obvious that Fogelman will play the “full circle”/ “everything’s connected” card (insert yawn here), regardless of plausibility, believability, or logic. He enjoys playing god far too much to care about such matters. For Fogelman, sentiment, emotion, and feeling always trump plausibility, believability, or logic. He assumes, maybe correctly, that audiences agree with him or will once they spend a couple of hours sitting in a movie theater with Life Itself’s cast of characters. Fogelman, however, can’t resist littering Life Itself with trite, maudlin life lessons, often where death or dying has made an appearance. There’s no one wiser apparently than someone battling late-stage cancer (lesson: live your life, live it fully, live it without regrets, you get one love of your life and that’s it, also, god is a cruel mother who’ll take everything good and wonderful from you without advance warning). It’s almost enough to cause permanent ocular damage from constant eye-rolling some, possibly many moviegoers will experience sitting through Life Itself’s seemingly interminable running time.
Fogelman’s super-secret weapon — an incredibly gifted, talented cast — can only elevate sup-par material so far (i.e., not far enough). Still, it’s impressive watching Isaac, Wilde, Cooke, Banderas, and Costas deliver Fogelman’s sub-banal dialogue with unwavering conviction. It never stops, however, feeling like a massive waste of their time and talent. They certainly deserved better. Then again, so did we.
