Hallmark sentimentality, passionate defenses of Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind and horrific head traumas are thrown together in Dan Fogelman’s Life Itself, a curious cocktail of a movie from the This Is Us creator about all of life’s highest highs and lowest lows across generations and continents. Fogelman has never met an extreme emotion he doesn’t want to exploit, and Life Itself might be the apex of that tendency.
For a movie in which the phrase “unreliable narrator” is repeated at least a dozen times, Life Itself is easy to spoil and oddly difficult to tease. It starts over several times, it lies, it misleads and surprises all in service of hammering in the thesis that “life is the unreliable narrator.” Life may be unreliable, sure, but movies don’t have to be to prove the point and this cynical device does not serve this earnest story. Nor does all the head trauma.
If there is a beginning, it’s with Will (Oscar Isaac) and Abby (Olivia Wilde), who are apart in the present, but not too long ago were married, living in New York and spending long mornings in bed cooing at each other and discussing that 1997 Dylan album. Will is doing so poorly with the separation that he’s taken up screenwriting and berating baristas while pouring alcohol into his coffee.
He tells his therapist, Dr. Morris (Annette Bening), about Abby and how in love, or, more accurately, how obsessed he was with her. She’s beautiful, nurturing, and will eat everything the sushi chef puts in front of her. There are shades of (500) Days of Summer in this whole segment as they go from the fateful Halloween where they fell in love, back to Abby’s tragic childhood and up to dinner with the in-laws (Mandy Patinkin and Jean Smart).
But then that part of the story abruptly ends and we’re taken to Spain to meet people who are sort of cosmically linked to the New Yorkers. Spain is the stronger part of the movie, with a compellingly written story of a simple farmer Javier (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), his wife Isabel (Laia Costa), their son and the wealthy farm owner and landlord, Mr. Saccione (Antonio Banderas). Yet even this reads as a little too conveniently cute and folksy to be fully embraced.
In fact, nothing much in Life Itself feels like life itself. It is too polished, too winking, too big and too much to be all that relatable, even with a cast as appealing as this.