Life Itself | Film Review

Dan Fogelman (This Is Us, creator) uses his masterful talent of displaying humanity in all of its raw and natural beauty to bring Life Itself to screen. A film that focuses on the power of tragedy, death, love, and life.

The first thing you should know is that if you’re expecting this to be a heavy romance, you’ve been misled. Life Itself (the film and reality) doesn’t focus on merely one event, one life, or one relationship. It certainly doesn’t follow a typical story line or structure, which can be expected coming from Fogelman.

We start with Will (Oscar Isaac) and Abby (Olivia Wilde) Dempsey. A passionate, immovable love story that is everything a dreamy girl has spent her life desiring, without feeling too far out of reality. Will and Abby fall quick and they fall fast. Moving through friendship in college, into dating, then marriage, and of course, the birth of their first child, Dylan Dempsey (grown up version, Olivia Cooke). There’s a complex transition between the present day and his flashbacks. Will is meeting with his therapist after recently being released from psychiatric care and the flashbacks are a means of telling the story of his life with Abby, his one true love. As the film progresses, we’re lead into other lives, but the memories that Fogelman elects to share with us are intertwined in some way. Essentially, your take-away is that life has a weird way of changing course, and there is always an impact to life events.

Though he does lose a bit of his solid grip partway through, Fogelman does a great job of structuring his inter-connected world for the most part. His biggest flaw is that he gets sidetracked into a story that doesn’t have enough relevance to indulge in. It’s truly remarkable how much content he is able to enter into 120 minutes, but he needs to trust his story-telling abilities more. He over-utilizes the narration, which waters down the impact of his characters and their choices. Audiences should be able to process what’s on screen without having to be told. If Fogelman can trust himself, and his audience, just a bit more, he genuinely has the capacity of being something prolific in both television AND film. Fogelman is receiving much criticism and not nearly enough credit for what was accomplished with this project by using a unique structure that we rarely see executed well, but I personally can’t wait to follow his career further.

While Dan Fogelman might not trust his audience to understand the film, or maybe his own writing to tell it, he definitely trusts his actors to shine. And that they do. The cast is incredible – from Oscar Isaac and Olivia Wilde, to Olivia Cooke and Alex Monner, but lest we not forget, Mandy Patinkin, Antonio Banderas, Laia Costa, and Sergio Peris-Menchata. Each of them put on performances that rocked the boat; drew us in and pushed us away. They welcomed us into their characters’ lives, hearts, emotions, and thoughts. Without a doubt, they made us feel that we were living in those moments with them.

These moments – whether positive or negative – are pivotal in structuring the lives of those who were immediately impacted, and those yet to come. It’s a visceral feeling watching the butterfly effect unravel in front of your eyes. It tears into your heart and inevitably, stitches it all back together. While shock and tension-driven plot points are there to continue to engage you, the film’s growth is divulged by heart and emotions. Every person has a story and every person has trauma. The film gives an overwhelming display of how everyone responds to trauma in a different way. Each event has a spider web’s reach on the many it affects, in various ways, that we often forget to consider.

Life Itself offers a message of hope: if you’re brought to your knees, you get back up and push forward. A message all of us can attempt to implement into our lives, even in the darkest of times. Our story is never over, even when our life is. But until that moment happens… You fight. You fight like hell. More importantly, you love like hell.