Life Itself Review: A disaster of a movie, trapped by its own privileges

For much of my life, I clung to the low probability of my existence.

This is not uncommon. At one time or another, we all inadvertently asked what could have happened if our parents had never met, or something similar. But this kind of questioning goes doubly for adoptees, like me, whose existence is often due to occasional and unexpected encounters that have resulted in totally unplanned pregnancies.

But all our existences are improbable, the fortuitous meeting of the two exact cells just to create us. And because the thought of this chance is more than a little terrifying, it is natural that we attribute a deep meaning to the thought that everything was happening we get to to exist, same as any other us-es that could have been live as haunting shadows our occasional speculations.

What I never really understood about all my questions about the circumstances of my life was that it was easier for me to speculate on the improbability of my life, because I finally had a life rather comfortable. It took me a long time, and many years, to realize that locating me at the center of this story made sense if the story was about me, but it was erasing the stories of so many people. 'other. Like my biological mother, how was her life in the months following my death? Or my parents – how did they live while waiting for a child?

I'm not sure Dan Fogelman, creator of That's us and writer / director of the new disastrous film Life itself, however, made this leap, judging by his reaction to the criticism of the new film. As much as he wants to tell great epic stories of the impossibility of living, he can never escape the comfortable life of a renowned Hollywood writer, where trauma and pain are things that we visit on characters. people, in our world, have to live with.

Life itself has a mediocre movie hidden somewhere. You have to go through a lot of bad movies to get there.

Amazon Studios

Fogelman has built his name as a writer on the tricks and structural techniques that tend to define genre storytellers. But if Fogelman tried science fiction and fantasy, it was only for his sitcoms (really funny) Neighbors and Galavant. When he releases something from his baggage of stuff, he tends to serve the intimate and relational stories of families and lovers that form the backbone of realistic fiction.

When it works, it really works. The vast majority of Fogelman's twists – especially in That's us – They exist especially to encourage the public to guess, but they do a surprising job in reproducing the ways in which we deceive our brain not to think of traumatic events.

That's us took too much time (a season and a half!) to reveal how her central death occurred, but she ended up telling a much better story of emotional suppression, trying to stop thinking about the things that hurt so much you turn your life into a void of feeling and how it can ruin a person, or even a family.

So when Fogelman handles this kind of conspiracy well, it's manipulation, yes, but it's cathartic too. We live next to the emotional repression of the characters, so that we, too, can feel the way she starts to flee and get out of it, in the same way that we could also handle our own grief.

But building a story like this on TV can amplify the flow and flow of these emotions, but doing it on film is very difficult.

It's there that Life itself flops. Fogelman took what amounts to a season of That's us twists and reveals (maybe more) and squeezes them into a 109-minute film. Movies Samuel L. Jackson reads the instructions from the scene from a screenplay (including asking the camera to "push" certain characters) before completely changing the protagonist of the movie, once, with a bus, and breaking the fourth wall again and again. "Prepare for the unexpected!

All of this is at the service of Fogelman's most defining thematic concern – the idea that every individual life is a collection of so many small, unlikely events that have led not only to the existence of everyone but to the existence of all other. So, Life itself takes the form of five "chapters" (technically six if one counts the interlude of Samuel L. Jackson as his own prologue) which detail the life of several different characters who are important for the general puzzle of the film.

And yet, the "book" (yes, there is a real book) that gives structure to the film would not not divulge anything to its audience, as its author (who is the post-Jackson narrator of the film) would be known to all readers.

So, the twists and turns Life itself not serve a real purpose other than to keep the audience guessing, dazzled by the random coincidences that make up a life. And this is where the movie gets a little naughty, as it requires to override a lot of annoyances that Fogelman's vision simply does not have any space, other than as something to overcome.

A character, for example, sees both of his parents dying at the age of 7, then sit in the back seat of the car behind their lifeless bodies – his father misses his head – for an hour in waiting to be rescued. She is quickly placed with an uncle who assaults her until the age of 15, when she shoots him in the knee and he recoils.

This is presented not as a horror but as an adversity, as something to overcome. And I'm not saying that people can not learn to live with trauma, but Life itself There is no room to explore how this could happen. Her answer to the question of "how do you live with horrible things" is: "Hey, I guess she had a therapy?"

Life itself is obsessed with unreliable narrators, but never quite realizes that the ultimate and unreliable narrator is Fogelman himself

Amazon Studios

Reducing the trauma into something to be overcome is, in the end, an extremely privileged point of view, the kind of idea that drives too many "sad films of whites" (of which Life itself is mainly a). This reduces the real struggle of anyone who faces a psychological burden and a grief or depression all over the place in something that can be turned into a three-act structure – or worse, in a film that does not have the time.

And, like, Fogelman can create emotionally affecting stories with psychological weight! That's us examined the story of a black child adopted by a white family with real sensitivity for both sides of this equation, and his best episodes showed how everyone can have the best intentions in a situation like that one and suffer from it.

But even at its best, Fogelman's work is a bit like listening to James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" when buying candles in a Pier One: he keeps questioning his economic comfort, his system valuable . There can be a spiritual balm to these kinds of stories, especially when it comes to the inability of some white communities in America to cope with grief or other emotions.

But when a script treats grief and trauma as something to be seen about the characters by a cruel writer, so that we can understand how everything will unfold, it only points out that everything will work especially if you have enough money and privilege to make sure of it.

Yes Life itself It's like shopping at Pier One, while the Barnes & Noble next door is also on fire. There are whole sections of this film that exist only to punish the characters, and even though parts of this film are made in 2037, 1985, and 2079, everything seems to be happening in 2013. (There is not even of attempt suggest what could be the future, apart from the idea that the New York City The Strand bookstore is not under water and still sells books printed in 2079, which is a good thing .)

The women in the film are all intelligent rather than intelligent – and it's not clear that Fogelman understands the difference between the two – and that men do not do much better. This is a larded script with ideas it never stops wondering if you would really marry the man who inadvertently got his mother hit by a bus at the age of 4.

There are some small moments that work in a vacuum (mainly about the story of Antonio Banderas as a nice tycoon of Spanish olives – seriously), but the film as a whole sinks so deeply into his first half-hour that he will never be able to dig out.

But the worst thing about Life itself This is why he can not realize that he is limited by his own point of view. It evokes the idea of ​​unreliable narrators in the literature, without seeming to understand either its mode of use, its functioning, or the way in which literary critics have approached this idea over time.

But it also suggests that all stories have de facto unreliable narrators, because of the limited perspective of those who tell them. I would say that these are Fogelman's excuses for the film, embedded in his text, but he was also self-conscious, Life itself probably not existed.

Life itself plays in movie theaters everywhere. Unfortunately, the second half is a bit boring, which protects it from the real magic of the movie.