life Itself (Movie, 2018)

The rambling “Life Itself” is a multigenerational drama about the messiness of life, but the emotional impact of the movie gets lost in the messiness of its screenplay. It’s an ambitious film by Writer-director Dan Fogelman, but unfortunately, an unqualified misfire. It covers multiple generations, but all the stories (and art direction) seem thoroughly modern. 

The movie uses unreliable narration as a way to pass off poor storytelling as a feature. This movie was told in five chapters of mystifyingly uneven length. All of it leads to heartbreak, betrayal, and an entire sequence designed to make fun of a minor character who didn’t look both ways before crossing the street, and it’s all interconnected to everything that came before. 

This is a film so obsessed with death that it hasn’t bothered to give us any reason to care for the living.