Life Itself

A drama that tries to bind several generations and two countries together. The film is divided into chapters. The first begins in New York with a young couple: Will and Abby met at university, married, and are expecting a child. Then the narrative breaks and moves somewhere else. The chapters that follow are about different people: a grandmother, a family working an olive grove in Spain, a young man who does not know his own past. The connection emerges slowly. The idea is that life is an unreliable narrator and nobody knows the whole of their own story. The thought is stated in the film directly. The cast is large: Oscar Isaac, Olivia Wilde, Annette Bening, Mandy Patinkin, Antonio Banderas. Dan Fogelman wrote and directed; he had built the same structure on television earlier. It met a harsh critical reaction on release, with the structure called forced and the use of feeling excessive. It found an audience of its own on streaming services afterwards. An emotionally loaded choice for anyone who likes multi-generational drama and interlocking narratives. For a viewer who wants restraint, the film keeps raising its emotional pitch and leans heavily on coincidence.