Life Itself
It’s rare for the Rotten Tomatoes crowd to lob consistently bad reviews at any movie, but for once the aggregated critics association are hurling abuse with one mind, giving Life Itself a rotten 13 percent positive rating. Given the free passes many of those key-pushers consistently grant to mediocre Hollywood product, the scale of their peevishness is puzzling. Life Itself won’t be the greatest movie any of us will see this year, but far from the worst, it cleverly zig-zags through the stories we tell to and about ourselves. And its A-List cast—including Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas—that rises to their roles.
A happily married couple are at the center of the spiraling plot lines. Will and Abby (Isaac and Wilde) seem made for each other—until Abby is no longer there and Will has turned into a drug-and-booze-addled derelict escorted out of Starbucks and avoided by fellow pedestrians. He is writing versions of his life as if it was a film narrated by Samuel L. Jackson in a barbed-irony voice-over. But he also gradually scripts out his trauma with the aid a patient therapist (Bening). And then Will is no longer there, leaving behind an infant daughter, Dylan.
As in Bob Dylan, the best introduction to poetry most of us born after 1960 ever had, whose spirit hovers over much of Life Itself—especially the songs from Abby’s favorite Dylan album, Time Out of Mind. Why not name their daughter Dylan? Sadly, neither parent will see her grow into a lyrical punk singer, thrashing out her lyrics in a CBGB’s style dive bar. But then, there is much stepping in and out of time, especially as Will and his therapist revisit episodes from the past.
But wait: we only have Will’s word for much of it. Not coincidently, Abby’s college thesis was on that fixture of literary criticism, the unreliable narrator. “I’m going to argue that by definition, every narrator is unreliable,” she tells Will in a college flashback. And perhaps, the film broadly hints, life itself is an unreliable narration because its vastness will always have to be edited by each participant, trimming or ignoring facts, interpreting them creatively, analyzing them rightly or falsely.
Lurching from trash talk to trauma, from humor to horror and sentimentality to casual profundity, Life Itself is kind of like life nowadays where dialogue often sounds like a screenplay for a streaming series forever in danger of cancellation.
