Every story has a narrator. Some are more unreliable than others: some mislead viewers deliberately (as in The Usual Suspects), while others are unreliable despite their best efforts (as in Rashomon).
But Abby, the whimsically idiosyncratic centrepiece of Life Itself, played by Olivia Wilde, has a grander argument: every narrator is unreliable, because every story is from a human perspective, and humans can never be objective. Abby’s eyes widen when she, an ostensible grad school academic, describes what she apparently doesn’t realize is an elementary school English thesis: because life is both unpredictable and objective, the most unreliable narrator is life itself!
Abby’s wrong, of course. The most unreliable narrator is not life itself. It’s Dan Fogelman.
Fogelman, the writer and director of this clunky beast of a film, seems like a really nice guy. He’s also open about his Judaism, and some of his films (like the disastrously reviewed The Guilt Trip, starring Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen on a mom-and-son road trip) are, if not overtly Jewish, clearly influenced by his upbringing.
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So Jewish audiences might be curious about Life Itself, particularly since this is his first film since his hit TV series, This is Us, picked up several Emmys, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award in the last two years.
Life Itself, which debuted at TIFF and opens in cinemas today, is similar to that show: it’s unabashedly sentimental, saccharine enough to give you a toothache. In some ways, it’s a typical intergenerational story about love and family, but that story is pockmarked by so many bizarrely unnecessary plot twists that it’s hard to describe.
Therein lies Fogelman’s biggest problem: he so clearly has no idea how to steer this unwieldy Franken-film that he writes himself an excuse by blaming every narrator, every storyteller to ever precede him.
Without spoiling anything, the film is about a depressed guy (Oscar Isaac) whose wife mysteriously left him, but then it’s also about his dad (Mandy Patinkin) embarking on a late-life parenting mission, and then after an hour the movie is about a Spanish family struggling with an intrusive Antonio Banderas, who – totally inexplicably, despite being extremely wealthy, rather kind, family-minded and as handsome as Antonio freakin’ Banderas – has spent decades unable to find a wife.
The film also includes eye-rollingly dumbed-down millennial stereotypes and the notion of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as a confusing and extraneous literary motif that pops up maybe three times in the whole film: not enough to mean anything, but just enough to make you wonder why Fogelman bothered at all. Is it about the combined sweetness and saltiness of life? Is it because life is messy but also simple? Is it because this movie comprises highly processed ingredients bundled into white bread? Who knows!
Like life itself, Life Itself is a frustratingly unpredictable roller coaster: sometimes distressing, sometimes enjoyable, often boring and kind of stupid. By the end, you’re asking why any of it mattered, and then you realize it didn’t, really. Life is just a series of random events; some are unnecessarily depressing, others more pleasant. Moviegoers looking for two hours of unbridled emotional manipulation might get a kick out of it. Anyone else would be better off enjoying any story told by a more reliable narrator.