Oscar Isaac and Antonio Banderas fight in "Life itself": NPR

Imagine sitting in a dark theater to see a movie you do not know anything about. (This film does not exist, but goes hand in hand). In the first scene, a man lovingly rehabilitates a dog with three legs. In the next – seemingly unrelated – scene, a girl is sitting behind the wheel of a car on her father's lap, laughing as he let her "drive". The words appear on the screen: "Written by Dan Fogelman". At this point, if you are intelligent, you will lean toward the person next to you and whisper in their ear, as discreetly as possible.

"I bet she's growing up and running on the dog."

Fogelman is best known right now as the creator of That's us, a hit drama series at the time of very few stories of this kind. It's like the new Fogelman movie Life itself and his comedy 2011 Crazy stupid love, a project "everything is connected", in which the events in one story end up crossing with the events of another. In Life itself, that he also realized, he is there again.

We spend some of our time on New York's married couple, Will and Abby Dempsey. Will (Oscar Isaac) has become rather a mess and has a gentle therapist (Annette Bening) who tries to guide him through a reexamination of his relationship with Abby (Olivia Wilde), all in a flashback. We see how Will has seduced Abby with an almost disturbing intensity – it's the part in the trailer in which he says that once he's asked her out, their relationship will be eternal. – and how they finally settled in married life. We learn what they've become since then, and why he's so upset Will's life.

But then, attention shifts from New York to Spain, and more particularly to the olive groves of the wealthy Mr. Saccione (Antonio Banderas). His trusted chef, Javier (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), has great loves: his wife Isabelle (Laia Costa) and their son Rodrigo (Alex Monner). Pride, love, wealth, jealousy and health care costs all come into play.

Two families, different continents, no apparent link. And although there is no driving course and no dog … just say it, it's a Fogelman story through and through.

There are individual scenes and moments that work almost astonishingly well: a brawl between Isabelle and Javier throbbing furiously, exchanges between Will's therapist and Bening who have a sneaky crack and the wealthy wisdom of Mandy Patinkin's father (the great Jean Smart as his mother has a lot less to do). Banderas delivers a long monologue that is a pure movie star, particularly captivating for those who have not seen him play in Spanish in most of his major American releases. (All action in Spain is in Spanish, subtitled in English).

Where the film falls, it is precisely there that it is trying to be grandiose. The title comes from a painfully delicate sequence in which the concept of the unreliable narrator is overexplicatedly screaming, which removes parts of the film in which the concept of unreliable narrator is skillfully demonstrated. There's an intriguing moment, for example, in which Will is forced to wonder if his ardor – which once worried Abby "I may not be equipped to be loved so much" – was romantic to him as he did, or if maybe she found him suffocating. But, just as Fogelman begins to play with this idea in the direction, he abandons it and the promising technique is never used again.

Similarly, the scenes in Spain are beautiful and the performances are strong, and the desire of Fogelman to make the interconnection of the characters more global makes sense, the dialogue in Spanish subtitled does not correspond to the relaxation of the sequences in New York. The story with Isaac and Wilde is talkative, casual, conversational; The story with Banderas is a pure melodrama, full of grand statements and short of humor.

And while Fogelman is well established as a versatile writer – he has written matted, to shout loudly – this is only his second feature as director after 2015 Danny Collins. His approach sometimes seems generic, by filming scenes of intimacy with a temptation that does not seem quite appropriate. While he likes extreme close-ups of faces for the purpose, the film could have used a more distinctive style, given that the structure is so unusual.

Because Fogelman's thematic interests are so special, it's worth thinking about what he's trying to say about everything connected. In the interviews, he suggested that what motivates his curiosity is really the tendency of life itself to be a little uneven and a little on the nose: good things on birthdays bad things, for example. He talks about connection to the intersection: the person who appears on your doorstep and needs help may actually be a person that you have passed on the street as a person who is in the street. child, that sort of thing. But is it connectivity?

One of the things that makes Life itself What is not satisfactory is that it relies on a coincidence to justify the connection. He connects his characters through the bizarre operation of chance. But when we are thirsty for connection, when we wonder about our place in the world, is that really what we mean? Could not we claim that everything is connected in the sense that even if we do not all share a common goal or basic levels of empathy for one another, we share at least one common destiny? Are you connected to this stranger because you may have already sat in front of each other in a public library or because you are human beings with common needs? Is it more important that we recognize a link with families working in Spanish olive groves because we could cross them, or simply because, in principle, these connections are real?

It is impossible not to admire the structural experimentation of Fogelman and his philosophical ambitions, which are considerable. But as these notes are hit louder and louder in every room, he writes – Crazy stupid love unless of this crossroads that That's uswho has less Life itself – yields decrease.

One last remark: I saw this film during a public screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. In the end, there was a lot of tears on the part of the public. That's us has adopted its reputation as a spectacle that makes your eyes cry; it's nothing if it's not good at that. Life itself is effective in this way too, and if you are ready to scream – in fact, if you feel like it – you will probably get it. But that can be more of a reflex than anything.