Life Itself review: A trite and manipulative saga filled with family tragedy

You are always so aware of who is pulling the strings that it is impossible to lose yourself in this story

Dir: Dan Fogelman. Starring: Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, Annette Bening, Mandy Patinkin, Olivia Cooke, Laia Costa, Antonio Banderas. Cert 15, 117 mins

Life itself is the “ultimate unreliable narrator”. That is one of the greeting card-style nuggets of wisdom shared in Dan Fogelman’s trite and manipulative new saga. The film continually draws attention to its own devices and tricks its audience. An opening voiceover from Samuel L Jackson turns out to be a complete diversion.

Tragic incidents are replayed but with different characters involved. Fogelman is continually warning us not to trust the storyteller. This surely isn’t wise given that he is the writer and director himself. The strangest aspect of the film is that it feels like a formalist exercise one moment and is sentimental and in deadly earnest the next. Scenes intended to be heartbreaking feel very false and contrived when we know that the writer-director can save his characters from their grief with a dash of his pen.

Fogelman is one of many filmmakers in recent years who have explored the butterfly effect. This is when a flap of the wings in one place causes an earthquake elsewhere. A small action by one character turns out to have a seismic ripple effect on the lives of others. As in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 2007 drama Babel, everything is interrelated. If a little boy on a bus distracts the driver at a crossing, the consequences of his action are felt across continents.

Oscar Isaac plays Will, the dreamy New Yorker who, as a fresh-faced young student, waits for the perfect moment to ask out Abby (Olivia Wilde), his college sweetheart. They’re so madly in love and so blissfully happy together that it is inevitable fate (or Fogelman) will play a few cruel tricks on them.

Some of the dialogue is stilted and self-conscious. You can’t help but groan inwardly when Abby tells Will that she “may not be prepared to be loved this much”. The two spend an inordinate amount of time discussing Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind lyrics, sounding like student music critics as they do so. Abby can’t resist talking about her student thesis at length as well. By exploring the role of unreliable narrators in literature, she thinks she has discovered the secret of life itself.

It doesn’t help that what should be the most tragic, heart-rending scenes play like something out of a 1970s pedestrian road safety film.

Fogelman tells the story out of sequence. The story is full of flashbacks and leaps into the future. Will is shown in sessions with a therapist (Annette Bening), trying and failing to pull himself together. Like Harry Dean Stanton alone in the wilderness in Paris, Texas, he is lost and bereft. In one scene in a coffee shop, the sweet-natured, doting figure from earlier in the movie has turned into a raging, drunken, mentally disturbed hobo. At first, the film doesn’t let us know why he has undergone such a transformation.

The New York scenes are followed by a large section of the film set in rural Andalusia where the locals endure equally complicated emotional lives. Just as Will courted Abby, so proud and hard-working Spanish farm worker Javier Gonzalez (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) sets out to win the hand of the shy and charming Isabel Diaz (Laia Costa). The couple’s idyllic life together is disturbed by Javier’s boss, Vincent Saccione (Antonio Banderas).

At least, Banderas brings some charisma to his role as the wealthy landowner. He is a grizzled and menacing figure but one prey to self-pity too. Like most of the other characters here, he has been bruised emotionally by horrific childhood experiences. We can’t tell whether he is benign or predatory, whether he wants to help Javier or steal his wife. At least, he knows how to tell a story.

In an otherwise bland affair, English actor Olivia Cooke shows some welcome rebellious, bad attitude as the unhappy Dylan, a young woman scarred emotionally by events in her earliest infancy and ready to hit out at anyone who teases or patronises her.

The film touches again and again on the chaos and misery in its protagonists’ lives but is never prepared to step too far into the darkness. Fogelman’s script will always provide them with a way back towards the light. For all the talk about unreliable narrators, we can almost always guess exactly how events will unfold. Coincidences abound.

There is something clumsy and contrived about the way the filmmakers bring the characters together. Lovers will bump into each other by chance. Their experiences will echo those of their parents. The writer-director is the puppet-master. You are always so aware that he is pulling the strings that it is impossible to lose yourself in his story.

Life Itself is released in UK cinemas on 4 January