Fogelman isn't the
household name that Shyamalan is, but for those who know who he is, his game is
getting equally as tiresome. He's been a Hollywood screenwriter for years with
a lot of animated credits to his name early on (Cars, Bolt,
Tangled). In 2011, he began the current phase of his career with Crazy
Stupid Love: a movie I adore. That is a movie that is unabashedly sincere.
It also has a single scene in which everything converges in a truly surprising
way. The reason it's so surprising is because I didn't think it was the kind of
movie to do that*. Since then, Fogelman has spent most of his time working on
TV. He had The Neighbors: a show about a regular family who moves into a
neighborhood then - surprise - finds out that all the neighbors are aliens. He
also had Pitch: a show about MLB's first female player. She gets advice
from her dad who - surprise - is actually dead. Most people know Fogelman for
his hit show This Is Us. That's a show built on massive sentimentality
that had a big twist in the first episode as well as many other episodes. So
much so, that I often jokingly call it Twist Is Us. Like Shyamalan,
these twists work the less you are expecting them. When you know to look for
them, it fundamentally changes how you watch a movie or show.
*I'm being
purposely vague because I don't want to spoil anything.
Which leads me to Life
Itself.
Life Itself is Fogelman's
latest film. He wrote and directed this one, in fact. It's a little hard to say
what it's about, because I risk ruining it if I go into too much detail. I
think my first two paragraphs have already tipped its hand though. So, it's a
movie about a couple - Will and Abby (Oscar Isaac and Olivia Wilde) - and how
their lives have an effect on those around them in wide reaching ways. It's a
movie told in chapters, and each chapter seemingly moves further and further
away from Will and Abby, until it all comes back together. In addition to Isaac
and Wilde, it has a pretty impressive cast, including Annette Bening, Mandy
Patinkin, Jean Smart, Olivia Cooke, and Antonio Banderas, and less familiar
actors like Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Laia Costa, and Alex Monner. Patinkin and
Smart are Isaac's parents. Bening is Isaac's therapist. I can't really say who
the rest of them play.
A lot of people
are going to hate this movie and a few people are going to adore it. That's
because it needs a lot of things for it to work. First, it needs an audience
who won't be concerned with solving the puzzle; an audience who is only
interested in the story being told at the time. Second, it needs an audience
who won't mind that the actors they probably came to see the movie for will be
absent for half or more of the movie. That's the big hurdle to overcome. Ideally,
the audience seeing Life Itself will be intrigued by how certain
characters disappear. That's not normally the case though. I expect more people
will feel cheated by it. Third, the audience has to be receptive to
meta-deconstruction of narrative. By that, I mean that the movie is very
self-aware. It calls attention to narrative devices as it's employing them. I
tend to love movies that do this, but I've learned from the box office results
for movies like Adaptation. and Stranger Than Fiction,
that I'm in the minority. If an audience member meets these conditions, then
this movie has the right mix of earnestness and surprise to really do some
damage (the good kind). If the movie can find that ideal audience, all it has
to do is get one of the many emotional beats to land and someone could fall
hard for it. Frankly, I wanted to be one of those people.
Instead, I thought
this movie was a complete mess. I'm aware of Fogelman's games, so that hurt the
movie some. When it starts taking its major detours, I immediately started
looking for the connections. That didn't help, but that's something I could
overcome (I still like This Is Us despite being savvy to the beats).
They way the stories ties together is nice enough. What bothered me about the movie
was the self-awareness. I'm a huge fan of playing with structure and narration.
Stranger Than Fiction is my all-time favorite movie. I'm even a fan of
something silly like Alex & Emma. However, the way that Life
Itself does it rubbed me the wrong way. It's too on-the-nose and too proud
of itself. It's the difference between someone saying something clever and
someone saying something clever then pointing out that they said something
clever. Life Itself is all about unreliable narrators. That's obvious pretty
early on, but then it goes and has a scene in which a character gives a speech
espousing the brilliance of using an unreliable narrator and she spells out the
themes of the movie in excruciating detail. It's a redundant and
self-congratulatory scene. It could've been cut from the movie and the subtext
of the movie would've still made it all clear. This comes out in other ways
that bother me too. There's a scene in which we get two versions of what two
characters are saying to each other. The first version includes touching
speeches that are the subtext of what the characters are saying. The
second is what the characters actually
say to each other. I actually liked the scene, because it's hard not to be
moved by what the characters are saying. It's struck me as lazy screenwriting.
Fogelman tries to get all the emotion from the scene without putting in the
work to get there. It was trying to have its cake and eat it too.
Life Itself feels like an
experiment, a screenwriting exercise, more than a movie. Fogelman wanted to
make a different kind of anthology movie. He wanted to make Love, Actually,
but without the interplay between the characters. He wanted to see how far away
from a story he could get and still bring it back to where it started. I think
he got more interested in the experiment than the story though. Each chapter of
the movie tells a different smaller story. None of these stories were all that
engaging. The chapter focusing on Oscar Isaac is too busy playing games and
hiding facts so they can be revealed later. The chapter with Olivia Cooke is
accidentally hilarious due to some miscasting. The latter chapters tell a
pretty stale story of a love triangle with a pretty nonsensical resolution. The
movie uses death as a trick to yield unearned emotion. When the movie reaches
the end, I was torn. I was ready for it to end, because it had gone on for long
enough, but it raced through the events at the end in an unsatisfying way. It's
kind of like how in school, I never learned about WWI. My teacher would spend
too much time on the American Revolution early on. When the end of the year
came, they were so far behind that they would have to race through the WWI
chapters. I didn't want the school year to be longer. I just wanted my teacher
to pace things better. In other words, the time management in the screenplay
and editing were sloppy.
That's not to say
the movie is without good parts. Oscar Isaac is always a pleasure to watch onscreen.
He and Olivia Wilde have great chemistry. Fogelman is so good at writing
heartfelt speeches that I almost forget how unearned the moment are. And the
actors deliver the lines and speeches like champs. Mandy Patinkin and Laia
Costa both get monologues that pack a wallop. Kind of like This Is Us
much of the time, if I could watch Life Itself with a fully exposed
heart and a turned-off brain, there's much to enjoy about it.
Movie Theater MVP: This goes to the
couple sitting further down my row in a mostly empty theater. Early on, I heard
the women tell her husband "This movie is weird...should we ask for a
refund". The husband said something like "No, we're already
here". They stayed quiet for much of the rest of the movie. At the end,
the woman then said, "That movie was good, but-" before trailing off.
I related to what she was saying. There are good things about Life Itself.
It just doesn't really work. It is a massively ambitious movie that loses the
trees for the forest. It's so worried about the big picture idea that it loses
sight of the story mechanics that keep an audience engaged and happy. It tries
to make up for it with scenes and speeches that work because audiences are
conditioned to make them work, not because of anything the movie does*. I
needed more than that.
*Think of it like
this. If a dog dies in a movie, it's always sad. It's sad whether the audience
knows the dog or not. Just because a movie is able to get an emotional response
from an audience, doesn't mean it's good. It just means that it killed a dog.
The same logic applies to much of Life Itself.
Verdict (?):
Strongly Don't Recommend
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