Even William Goldman, dean of screenwriters (The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Misery, and more) testifies to the difficulty of writing a successful screenplay. He commented, “The single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. Not one person knows for a certainty what’s going to work.”
And if you don’t know what’s going to work, why not try it all? Just throw everything in the script and on the screen, hoping something will stick.
In Life Itself, the screenwriter/director Dan Fogelman (This Is Us on NBC) has given us a multi-generational family saga, spanning eight or so decades, love stories set in New York City and Carmona, Spain, multiple narrative threads, multiple overlapping and often contradictory viewpoints, multiple deaths, multiple scenes repeated but with altered lines and discrepant information, scenes where a character in third person watches his first person self, rapid-fire quick-cut transitions showing toddlers becoming children becoming teenagers becoming young adults, faces that dissolve and morph in seconds, the linear chronology abandoned for montage, voiceover, and flashback.
Like I said, whiplash. Didn’t they make that movie, already?
With the various threads at work, I suppose the overarching narrative is that of a love story when Abbie (Olivia Wilde) and Will (Oscar Isaac), a young and gorgeous New York couple, meet in college, get married and get pregnant, all while she struggles to write her thesis on the unreliable narrator in literature (only in the movies). But tragedy punctures their promising lives, and Will must see a psychiatrist (Annette Bening) to deal with the trauma. These sessions, the insightful questions asked and the halting answers given, provide the backstory, all from Will’s perspective, of course, which is increasingly suspect. We hear of Will and Abbie’s respective childhoods and we meet his parents (Mandy Patinkin and Jean Smart). More melodrama. More trauma. More chapters.
Olivia and Will’s daughter Dylan (Olivia Cooke) ends up being raised by her grandfather, rejecting his values to become a bad-ass singer in a punk band. Then as if from a separate film, we shift to Spain and see the Telenova-like story of Mr. Saccione (Antonio Banderas), the owner of an olive grove who offers a valuable worker Javier (Sergio Peres-Mencheta) free room and board for his services. With some hesitation and pride, he moves in with his wife Elena (Laia Costa) and they soon have a son Rodrigo (various actors but all grown up played by Alex Monner). As a boy, Rodrigo accompanies his parents on a trip to New York City, where he witnesses a horrific scene which leads to his own emotional damage that he must deal with the rest of his life. It’s Rodrigo’s boyhood trauma on the streets of New York that ultimately brings the disparate pieces together, for when he returns to New York to go to college, he just happens to encounter Dylan who has launched herself into the world too. Then director Fogelman ends in his final framing trick with the film’s one legitimate narrator, all in homage to the writer’s craft as story-teller.
Got it?
Excuse me, but it’s all like a Venn diagram when the pieces barely overlap into position, like a Rubik’s cube whose 54 facets almost click into arrangement, like a sudoku puzzle where the numbers don’t quite add up, like a Chinese box within a box revealing only cubic cardboard, like a matryoshka doll within a doll till you’re left with nothingness.
Yeah, I could go on and on, intentionally hammering you with all those infuriating and exasperating narrative structures, just as the writer-director Fogelman hammers the audience so they struggle, even days later, with this film as a cryptic interlocking mystery meant to be solved. Indeed, just minutes later after viewing the film, I tried, and failed, to replicate the convoluted time frame and complicated plot. I don’t mind non-linearity, but I do mind a manic, disjointed ricochet of dialogue and narration, most often pablum-laced cliches about life dropping you to your knees but you climb back up and keep going. We are comforted and soothed to learn that “Life itself is the ultimate unreliable narrator.”
Watch me write. Watch me direct. Watch me open with a prologue and end with an epilogue. Watch me use title cards to designate the five chapters of my movie. Watch me celebrate the primacy of the screenwriter who can meta all over myself with internal references to Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind comeback album and Tarantino movies and repeated use of the title itself. Watch me trick you by breaking the fourth wall when I pull the camera back from an intense encounter only to reveal that it’s just a scene being shot by a film director (Samuel L. Jackson) from a misguided autobiographical screenplay written by Will. Watch me name the dog “Fuckface” with all the hilarity that ensues. Watch me set up multiple characters who distractedly walk into busy streets with predictable results. Watch me manipulate the unreliable narrator till your head is spinning. Watch me pile on one death after another, washing you in grief porn. Watch me jerk your tears. Watch me. I write, therefore, I am.
Fogelman has commented that he “made this film so people could walk out of a movie theater feeling better than they did when they walked in.” Hmmm, unlike his TV work where there’s a 20-hour season to tell the multi-strand stories, here two or so hours must suffice, so choices should have been made with fewer tricky tactics. I left the theater, feeling neither better nor worse, just bewildered and bothered, not at all bewitched.
There’s truth to Thomas Mann’s notion that a writer is “someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
Fogelman writes. The viewer writhes.
Ben Wiley taught literature and film at St. Petersburg College. At USF/Tampa, he was statewide Director of the Florida Consortium/University of Cambridge (UK) International Summer Schools. His interests are film, theater, books, and kayaking Florida rivers. He also writes the BookStories feature in Creative Loafing Tampa. Contact him here.
This article appears in Sep 20-27, 2018.
