Life Itself (2018)
Directed by Dan Fogelman
As a young New York couple goes from college romance to marriage and the birth of their first child, the unexpected twists of their journey create reverberations that echo over continents and through lifetimes.
32 connections found
View:
32 films that influenced Life Itself
What critics say influenced Life Itself
Abby, a graduate student, makes this banal observation her college thesis while she’s being romantically pursued by Will (Oscar Isaac), an erstwhile screenwriter whose Pulp Fiction-ish scribbles make for a confusingly self-referential and violent start to the film.
He proposes at a costume party where they're dressed as John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction; soon they have a baby on the way and a sweet little dog named Fuckface, just so it's clear they have an edge and are not merely swooning saps.
There’s a few early references to “Pulp Fiction” in a present context and characters in different chapters define their relationship to Bob Dylan music in a present/past way.
That might explain why college sweethearts Will (Oscar Isaac) and Abby (Olivia Wilde) begin their story dressed up as characters from Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction."
As such, we enjoy flashbacks of his romance with Wilde, filled with poetic declarations of love, “Pulp Fiction” costume parties and a dog named “F*** Face” (you won’t see that on NBC, folks!).
Complete with dated Pulp Fiction references, monologues about Bob Dylan’s comeback album, and more misapplied quirk than, well, an episode of This Is Us.
As in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 2007 drama Babel , everything is interrelated.
It essentially brings nothing new to the table, and Fogelman’s vision doesn’t break new ground, considering the cinematic catalogue has already explored this concept with films such as Babel, Vantage Point and even the Oscar-winning Crash (the less said about that film, the better) with various degrees of success.
Think Crash or Babel , movies trying so hard to Be About Something they come across as maudlin.
An unholy combination of “Rashomon” and “Babel,” it strings together seemingly disparate plotlines into one massive, messy tableau of (sorry, has to be done) life itself, a life that zings toward the warm embrace of death.
This is one of those Crash, Babel, or Magnolia-esque dramas where all of the seemingly disparate stories are connected in some type of way.
They're all cogs in a "we're all connected (by senseless death, trauma, and self-hate; also baby-making)" construct that feels more artificial and inorganic by far than the most grotesquely contrived trash of the 2000s hyperlink narrative fad; it feels like a version of the already-not-very-good 2006 Babel that was made by serial killers.
This part of the film includes a nod to the 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life when Will goes back in time to see random moments in the past that will likely shape his future.
It’s actually funny that Fogelman enjoys referencing Tarantino so much in this movie because the script kills off more characters than Reservoir Dogs .
Advertisement
But this story is just the first of several morbid twists in a multi-generational, multi-chapter saga of schmaltz, set into motion by a Manhattan bus accident, à la Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret .
The idea of romance through the years, or just the idea of focusing on multiple interrelated stories, is nothing new, having been seen in films ranging from the beloved Christmas classic Love, Actually or the more trite Valentine’s Day to those more thought-provoking in nature, such as Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Magnolia or Alejandro G. Iñárritu‘s Amores Perros .
On a scale of “Magnolia” to “Crash” to “Collateral Beauty,” this one is closer to the lattermost.
This is one of those Crash, Babel, or Magnolia-esque dramas where all of the seemingly disparate stories are connected in some type of way.
But be warned, make sure you bring your Kleenex with you, because “Life Itself” makes “Manchester by the Sea” look like the second coming of “Airplane!”
(Bizarrely, the central theme is that of Lonergan’s follow-up, Manchester By The Sea : the inheritance of grief.)
Throughout, we are treated to changes in point of view; skips back and forth in space and time; multiple versions of Bob Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind track “Make You Feel My Love” (just like in, uh, the 1998 Sandra Bullock vehicle Hope Floats ) and discussions of said song; cutesy-poo dramedy hijinks involving Pulp Fiction -themed Halloween costumes and a dog named Fuckface; and some of the least convincing depictions of comparative literary studies or punk rebellion in the history of cinema.
Advertisement
Everything is tied together at tale's end through the new character of Elena (Lorenza Izzo, "Knock Knock," "The Green Inferno"), using the device of a book reading to bookend the film's literary themes.
Considering Will and Abby’s fondness for 1990s cinema ( Pulp Fiction , Beautiful Girls and The Professional are all directly referenced), one can assume their romance and marriage takes place during that decade.