Went to to see the film Life Itself, which is the new movie from the creator of the This is Us tv show (which I’ve never seen). I was hoping this would be a great intro to his writing and maybe an excuse to give the show a try… I’m going to assume this film is an aberration and that the guy has actual talent.
Life Itself is a ridiculously pretension pile of garbage. I hate this movie. I mean, like, a lot.
Remember that scene in Fight Club on the plane where Edward Norton mentions “single serve friends” and Brad Pitt replies, “How’s that working out for you? Being clever?” You can say that for just about every single minute of this silly, self-important, pretentious script. It think’s it SO clever and rubs that cleverness into you minute by eye-gouging, brain-bloating minute.
The plot… well… it’s one of those “interconnectedness of life” plots with a large cast full of characters whose stories interlock and we learn Important Life Lessons.
The film starts with a voice over from Sam Jackson explaining who the hero of this movie is… only its not this one guy the film first focuses on… it’s actually Annette Benning playing a psychiatrist… only she gets hit by a bus so Sam Jackson decides to leave the movie (literally). We then meet Oscar Isaac who was writing the script that contained the Sam Jackson voice over and he’s in therapy with Annette Benning who hasn’t been hit by a bus. We slowly (and I mean slowly) learn about his failed married with Olivia Wilde… and we get to see fun things like pregnant women get hit by a bus and other characters shoot themselves in the head and dogs die and edgy edgelord teenagers and their obsession with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Spanish olive farmers and the shitty husbands they make. And on and on.
Pretentious… yes. This movie is called Life Itself because, like, wow, it’s going to give you the meaning of life itself. Or maybe its going to have a college student babble about the “unreliable narrator” for her thesis… but, like, this MOVIE is about unreliable narrators, man. Mind = Blown. But, like, maybe life itself is the REAL unreliable narrator! Wow, dude. That’s deep.
Not to be too snarky… this kind of stuff could work if written and filmed with more subtlety. For example, the film is obsessed with the genius of Bob Dylan. It worships at the altar of Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is like, life itself, man. And, don’t get me wrong, I like Bob Dylan just fine. But this movie presents Dylan as if nobody had ever thought Bob Dylan was a genius before. That THIS movie and THESE deep characters are the font from which Bob Dylan worship has sprung.
Stay away from this unless you want to watch a cinematic train wreck and laugh. From that angle, you can get some amusement out of it… but only a little because, when it’s boring, it’s booooring. You can’t enjoy it ironically when you’d rather be out in the lobby chatting with the theater staff. Hey, if you want a similar trainwreck, watch Collateral Beauty with Will Smith. That’s bafflingly bad and pretty much always entertaining.
Score: 56