"Life" and death (many, many deaths)

"Life Itself," the heartbreaking melodrama of author-director Dan Fogelman, is a film about the bad things that happen to the right people. It's funny, because the very talented cast is stuck in a particularly bad movie. The film, which divides its time between a bereaved family in New York and a family soon in mourning in Spain, crushes in 118 minutes the amount of tragedy housed in a soap throughout the season. This may not make you fall into a lot of nostalgic tears, but you will definitely try.

Fogelman is familiar with the genre, having created Emmy-nominated "This Is Us," which has enough loss-making skills to make it one of NBC's most watched shows. "Life itself" fails to provoke the same sniffles, instead drowning its distribution in a sticky and soggy script.

The film opens on a desperate and disheveled Oscar lost after the love of his life, Olivia Wilde, disappeared after several years of marriage. During a therapy session with Annette Bening, a sudden sadness unfolds. From there, in a chapter format, Fogelman tells a story of family tragedies that overlap, ending with the inevitable: love.

But almost everyone in this movie will die, and this is not an exaggeration. There are car accidents, suicides and cancers. The grandparents die. The parents are dying. Even a dog will die. A dog! The so-called tragedy described here concerns the variety of shark attack and love at first sight: random, titillating and brutal. As such, "Life itself" quickly ceases to resemble life itself.

Beneath the patina of Brett Pawlak's embraced cinematography, all this death seems incidental to what Fogelman thinks is the real theme: right and right coincidences. It is a story of meetings, quite amazing, even if they are facilitated by sidewalks and offices of psychiatrists splashed with blood. As the story progresses, this strange crack is cracking.

Despite the systematic slaughter of his most sympathetic characters by Fogelman, a few glances at the early screening that I attended required drying as the credits unfolded. For that, credit the casting. Through performances such as the melancholy decency of Antonio Banderas as olive suzerain or Mandy Patinkin's grandfather mixer, the clunker scenario takes on an obscure form.

But why buy a ticket? "Life itself" will be just as exciting when you release it in a few months.

★

LIFE ITSELF

Written and directed by Dan Fogelman. Featuring: Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, Annette Bening, Mandy Patinkin, Antonio Banderas, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Laia Costa.

In Kendall Square, West Newton. 118 minutes. R (sexual references, some violent images, brief drug use).

Amelia Nierenberg can be contacted at [email protected].