As a young New York couple goes from college romance to marriage and the birth of their first child, the unexpected twists of their journey create reverberations that echo over continents and through lifetimes.
Written and directed by This Is Us series creator Dan Fogelman, Life Itself is a film told in five distinct chapters from the perspective of five different protagonists. Before I continue any further, I'd like to preface my thoughts by informing you that I began watching This Is Us this past summer and instantly adored the acclaimed series. Believe it or not, but I had some reservations about This Is Us. I was reluctant to begin watching the series because I thought it looked like an emotionally-manipulative melodramatic soap opera and didn't feel that it would be up my alley. Nevertheless, I binged the first two seasons in a matter of days and am eagerly awaiting the season three premiere next Tuesday. I say this because I want to communicate that I'm now a fan of Fogelman's work and was rooting for Life Itself to be a smashing success. I sought out the film in spite of its scathing reviews and held out hope I might at least be able to enjoy the motion-picture. However, my faith was tragically misplaced as Life Itself is one of the year's biggest disappointments.
Marketed as a feature-length version of This Is Us, Life Itself proves to be the crude, condensed and confused version. Imagine if you took the thematic material, non-chronological storytelling, and sentimentality of the series, dialed it up to an eleven, shoved it in a blender, and then forcibly pieced everything back together afterward. That concoction is the best possible description of Life Itself. It strangely tries to be Tarantino-esque with tons of vulgarity and hyper-violence while striving to emulate This Is Us' emotional sincerity as well. The amalgamation doesn't work whatsoever because there are jarring tonal inconsistencies between the presentation and the subject matter. Fogelman oddly seeks to portray toxic behavior like unhealthy obsession and abandonment as though they're endearing when they're not. He plays some of this darker material for laughs, and it just leaves you feeling extremely uncomfortable.
Spread throughout the film are several abrupt tonal shifts which act as shock value for the sake of shock value. I do not particularly appreciate using the term "emotionally manipulative" in my criticism because I think it's well within reason for a filmmaker to try and draw an emotional response from their audience, provided the narrative earn its emotional beats. Ultimately, the filmmaker's goal is to connect with the audience and convince them that they should care or feel something when all is said-and-done. Life Itself fails spectacularly in that regard because it never earns its emotional beats. The situations the characters find themselves in feel needlessly contrived for the sake of cheap sentimentality. Their lives are riddled with tragedy to such an exaggerated extent that it's honestly unbelievable and unrealistic.
Not to mention the characters are woefully underdeveloped. Where This Is Us is a prime example of a series that earns emotion by fleshing out its characters and crafting genuine drama, Life Itself hardly devotes enough time for the viewer to form a meaningful attachment with any characters. Each chapter lasts anywhere from 15-to-30 minutes, mostly composed of ineffective voiceover narration spoken over romantic montages. Of course, This Is Us has the benefit of being told as a long-form episodic series, but Life Itself backed itself into a corner from the start thanks to its structural approach. Many of these characters lack personality beyond being one-note human sketches. The five chapters follow a depressed man, an angsty young woman, a careful Spanish olive plantation worker, a traumatized college student, and the narrator herself who possesses no worthwhile character traits. A narrative thread connects this multi-generational, cross-continental web of stories, but the chapters are at odds with one another as initially presented.
Built around the profound thesis that "life is the ultimate unreliable narrator," Life Itself never dives any deeper into its superficial message. I heard those words at least twenty times, but have yet to understand the grand significance of them. Like what the heck does that REALLY mean? I don't know, and I'm sure Fogelman doesn't either.
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