Butler's Cinema Scene

Olivia Wilde, Oscar Isaac

“LIFE ITSELF” My rating: C-

118 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Having conquered the world of episodic television with the emotion-wringing family drama “This is Us,”  writer/director Dan Fogelman turns to the big screen with “Life Itself.”

Things don’t go well.

As the title suggests, Fogelman is here attempting nothing less than a God’s-eye view of human lives, all of them entangled — though at first that’s not obvious.  While “This is Us” appeals directly to big laughs and big tears, “Life Itself” is curiously muted, as if we’re observing the characters across vast distances.  Those looking for a good cry will probably leave looking for something to punch.

The film is perversely curious, for Fogelman has given us nothing less than a humanistic, non-violent parody/homage of Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction.” Like that film, “Life Itself” is broken into specific chapters and employs a time-leaping narrative (something with which Fogelman is familiar…see “This is Us”). At one point characters attend a party dressed like John Travolta and Uma Thurman in “Pulp Fiction’s”  famous dance contest; at least twice in “Life Itself” the movie slows down so that characters can deliver long Tarantino-esque monologues. Tarantino regular Samuel L. Jackson even pops up in an extended cameo so weird it defies description.

So what’s the movie about?  Well, let’s break it down by  chapters.

• In the opening sequence the bearded, unkempt Will (Oscar Isaac) is getting therapy from a shrink (Annette Bening). We gradually learn that his beloved wife Abby has left him (in flashbacks she’s played by Olivia Wilde).  We see their romantic meeting, their growing love, their relationship with Will’s parents (Mandy Patinkin, Jean Smart), their anticipation of the birth of their child. We discover that Will’s therapy was court-mandated after a suicide attempt and a few months in a mental ward. Eventually we discover what happened to Abby.
• The next segment follows the childhood of Will and Abby’s daughter, Dylan (Olivia Cooke), who is raised by her widowed grandpa and grows up to be a smart/rebellious punk rocker, though tormented by the loss of the parents she never met.

Annette Bening

• Jump to Spain, where the wealthy Saccione (Antonio Banderas) turns over his olive business to the taciturn worker Javier (Sergio Peris-Mencheta). As the years pass, Saccione finds he has fallen in love with Javier’s wife (Laia Costa) and young son, Rodrigo.  Javier leaves and the older man in effect becomes the new head of the household.
• The adolescent Rodrigo (Alex Monner) studies in NYC, dates a rich self-absorbed Long Islander (Isabel Durant) and finds himself drawn to a young woman he encounters weeping on the street.
• Finally we meet Rodrigo’s now-grown daughter…who is also the granddaughter of Will and Abby from the first episode.  She’s promoting the book she wrote about her family history.  It’s called “Life Itself” and it refers to Abby’s

Antonio Banderas

college thesis, which maintains that the unreliable narrator, a familiar device in literature and film, is in fact the essence of life…that life itself is unreliable.

Confused yet?  Wait, there’s more.  In the first episode Abby rhapsodizes about the poetic power of Bob Dylan, and throughout the film we are treated to different versions — including a thrash-rock reprise — of Dylan’s uncharacteristically romantic song from ’97, “Make You Feel My Love.”

Fogelman is knocking himself out to deliver profundities that just aren’t there.  The film’s quirky delivery is often maddening. Some of Fogelman’s devices pay off in the long run — seeds sown in early episodes flower in the latter stages — but that doesn’t make up for the fact that some of those early scenes are so irritating a viewer can be excused for making for the exit.

| Robert W. Butler