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No matter who who is considering seeing "Life Itself", stop here – almost everything that is said about the film is likely to be a spoiler, because its real subject is death itself. In this multigenerational saga, which is extremely poorly conceived and poorly conceived, writer and director Dan Fogelman (the creator of the television series "This Is Us") sends his characters with all the feeling of chess pieces. A viewer seeking advice on the trailer, for example, could expect Olivia Wilde and Oscar Isaac to describe the main characters, and they do so metaphysically, but Fogelman removes them from the painting. at the beginning of the game. The death of their characters, like the others in the film, does not happen because they reflect a dramatic vision or a symbolic import, but because Fogelman has developed a result that depends on these movements.
Will (Isaac) and Abby (Wilde) are a married couple in New York. Screenwriter, graduate student, she is pregnant. Abby's life was marked by tragedy: she was orphaned at the age of seven when her parents were killed in a car accident. During a fun walk with Will, Abby is hit by a bus and dies, but the baby, Dylan, lives. Six months deep in his grief, unable even to see the child, Will commits suicide. Dylan (named after Bob) is raised by Will's parents, Linda (Jean Smart) and Irwin (Mandy Patinkin); then Linda dies and, as affectionate and understanding as Irwin is, Dylan's teen revolt is strong and bitter. She skips a college, becomes a rock musician, finds herself in an emotional crisis, flees a club for a bench on the street and, there, meets a N.Y.U. A student named Rodrigo – whose story takes up the film, which is just beginning.
There is not much director style in "Life itself". Fogelman is fond of accidents and sudden intrusions; his characters take drastic measures suddenly, without discussion or reflection, because he subordinates them to external events that set in motion a chain of simplistic rationalizations, thin but inflexible. Yet, he dresses this wobbly and cold gear with distracting images of flashbacks illustrating and false starts and flamboyant keys of wisdom to simulate the liveliness of which the characters are deprived. There's a movie-in-a-movie, scenes from Will and Abby's college playground and couple details about couple life, with Will's stories about Bob Dylan's pop return and a dog named Fuckface. . (There's also a subplot involving a suburban Jewish student named Shari Dickstein, played by Isabel Durant, which reads as a revenge that Fogelman has been dreaming for decades.)
To excuse her own easy performance of her characters, Fogelman puts a line in Linda's mouth at a luncheon with Abby and Will, expressing his satisfaction that Will has married a woman whose parents are dead – so that he will not be in trouble. she does not have to share the grandchildren with another set of grandparents. In Linda's joyous characterization, the macabre facility seems amusing, but the line springs from the film to embody Fogelman's insensitive sub-philosophy of making heartless discoveries. And the film is not halfway through.
But first, check the dates: Abby was born in 1985; by the time Dylan turns twenty-one, the chaotic night of his meeting with Rodrigo, the story will run well into the future – the 1930s, approximately, if Abby had Dylan around thirty. But Fogelman hardly reveals an idea of how this future will differ much from the present time. Instead, he takes us abruptly to Spain. There, a farm worker named Javier (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) courts and marries a waitress named Isabel (Laia Costa); they have a son, Rodrigo. The grandiloquent and fabulously wealthy owner of the estate, named Saccione (Antonio Banderas), observes the loving care that Javier devotes to each olive (really) and summons him to his sumptuous study for a conversation and a promotion. (This section is maintained by the resonant themes of class relations and worker pride, even if left unresolved.)
True to itself, the story of Saccione and Javier revolves around health or rather disease. There is a strange sub-plot involving medical treatment for Rodrigo, who seems to be rooted in Fogelman's extreme pessimism regarding the state of the Spanish health care system in the near future. There is another one that concerns Isabel's health and, given the film's record with maternal lives, the turn that takes her health is not a surprise.
The trick that Saccione's money takes is not either. He is himself an heir; Dylan, raised by grandparents who live in a plush townhouse, is an heiress of sorts; and Rodrigo turns out to be also the beneficiary of Saccione's wealth. "Life itself" is, for the most part, a work of inheritance conditioning a cult of domino, a sentimental worship of ancestors, based on gratitude for the wealth accumulated by these ancestors in an age of 30 years. and opportunities that now exist only for newcomers to live long enough to tell the story. If this film is an indication, the current success of Fogelman and his narrative prowess are just a prelude to Fogelman ballads that his descendants, enriched and grateful, sing one day. The end of the film's celebration by generations of ancestors ends in 2079, the centenary year of Fogelman.
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