Life Itself

Life Itself starts out with great promise – a dizzying first act that creates the tapestry of a character’s life by offering a kaleidoscope of moments from his past. It’s poignant, effective, and punctuated by actions that are breathtakingly sudden and unexpected. However, after the strong beginning, the movie takes a conventional turn.

Despite good moments and an ambition to reach for the profound, Life Itself settles for trite, sentimental and patience testing. A killer cast deserve better.

Dan Fogelman’s Life Itself packs in enough narrative twists and turns to leave viewers with a sense of emotional whiplash. One tragedy bleeds into another so often that the events begin to blur.

The rambling Life Itself is a multigenerational drama about the messiness of life, but the emotional impact of the movie gets lost in the messiness of its screenplay. And though there is not one subpar acting performance, the film itself comes off as an exercise in self-consciousness.

Life Itself thinks you’re stupid. Or, if not stupid, unable to understand how a movie should work. It’s a movie made for people who can’t be trusted to understand any storytelling unless it’s not just spoon-fed but ladled on, piled high, and explained via montage and voiceover.

You rarely get the sense of Fogelman’s characters being complex figures with internal lives – instead they’re merely there to smile weakly through whatever trauma their sadistic creator puts them through.

How do you rate a cinematic black hole that doesn’t deserve a single star? Do you simply give it five eyerolls? Better question: How does a movie, with all the talent in the world going for it, become a such a blithering botch job?

This film is an absolute masterpiece. It consists of intricate story telling and connects it's intertwining stories into a beautiful and emotional journey. This film is not about the ending or the climax and doesn't conform to conventional story telling, but that should not take away from it's creative writing and tear jerking moments.

In short, the film is watchable and even enjoyable in some respects due to good individual performances and good dialogue; however, I found it to difficult to remain engaged for several reasons. First, the various stories seem unrelated with only minor interactions. The transitions are abrupt, ending one story and then moving onto the next. While the plot ties them all together in the end, waiting for it takes some effort. Second, all of the stories are centered around tragedy and I just stopped caring at some point. Third, with the amount of time spent on the "unreliable narrator" device in the beginning, I expected (or even hoped for) it to play a significant role in the movie, but it doesn't. Sure, there is a little twist in the end that ties it all together, but it is ineffective and unimportant. Finally, the resolution at the end that ties everything together was a disappointment.

Life Itself tries to be tricky by playing around with death and a theme the film reveals concerning unreliable narrators. I think the film gets better with time. The film seems to be saying without love, there is nothing, though if one persists in their life, they will find everlasting love; Life Itself makes love the ever connecting fabric between the dead and the living. I always like to remember as a part of the audience I am agreeing to view the content as-is in comparison to its full potential (which helps fulfill my critiquing) and if I want to view different forms of content then I should create or seek them. The film as-is is decent though leaves me as an audience member with the assignment of listening to Bob Dylan's return project to potentially fully grasp the essence of the film (if Bob Dylan really contributes to it as much as the film makes it seem). Life Itself is not meant to be a serious film (you have to experience the narrating for yourself) though deals with serious situations. The film shows that dialogue really affects actors and must be written well for effective scenes in film. Life Itself is showing life without expectations and relays life as uncontrollable in a great mysteriousness. I mean, yeah… death is our only guarantee (as far as I think anyone knows so far, that's all anyone knows of life that really isn't life, it's post life?). Overall Grade: C+ - K.D. If you're into Poetry and other bits of creativity, check out my Instagram: @Dufreshest.

Life Itself is the sad kind of drama that pushes and shoves melodramatic and harsh situations in order to make you identify with them and care about their characters, because it's incapable of genuinely building its momentum. Those reasons and their gross exaggeration make this film both meaningless and artificial. Good cast, squandered again.

With so much acting potential it’s incredibly unfortunate this films fails so badly. Not saying the acting is bad, it’s just so depressing, one bad thing after another. This isn’t life itself as we or I know it. In rare cases there is some sympathy for this but this is a poor attempt at trying to be incredible powerful film with great performances and as I’ve said it fails very badly.