Review: It’s Called ‘Life Itself,’ and Yet Everyone’s Dead

“Life Itself,” Dan Fogelman’s inadvertently hilarious new movie, reminded me of a line from “The Importance of Being Earnest” Oscar Wilde’s deliberately hilarious old play. “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

“This Is Us,” Fogelman’s much-watched NBC series, wrung whole monsoon seasons of tears (and a bucket of Emmy nominations) from the loss of just one dad. In “Life Itself” the parental slaughter is downright wanton. Mothers and fathers are hit by buses, perish in car accidents, commit suicide and succumb to cancer. You wouldn’t exactly call it carelessness, since all the bereavement seems to have been arranged with meticulous care. Maybe “misfortune” is the right word after all, though more for the audience than the various orphaned children.

The first of these is Abby (Olivia Wilde) whose parents have the discretion to perish off-screen, and whom we first encounter snuggling with her husband, Will (Oscar Isaac), arguing about the merits of a particular Bob Dylan album. (It is “Time Out of Mind” if you really want to know). Actually, we meet Will first, ranting and raving and weeping and wailing in a coffee shop and in his therapist’s office, his actions explained by the voice-over narration of Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson’s presence — like Annette Bening’s as the therapist — is a red herring and kind of a cheat. For a few minutes the movie pretends to be a lot more fun than it really is.

To be honest, a plot summary would make “Life Itself” sound like fun, because it might create an impression of antic preposterousness. The story flashes back to Will and Abby meeting in college, jumps sidewise to a visit to Will’s parents (Jean Smart and Mandy Patinkin) and then leaps across the Atlantic from Manhattan to Spain, where Antonio Banderas tells a sad story while gazing at a glass of sherry. Horrible things happen — bus accident, cancer, etc. — but the mood throughout is of woozy wonder. Isn’t it amazing how human destinies intertwine? This movie seems intent on persuading you that the answer is “no.”

Abby’s college thesis is on the concept of the unreliable narrator. With charming undergraduate fervor, she breathlessly explains to Will that the ultimate unreliable narrator is “life.” To be fair to “Life Itself,” the thesis is a failure, but the movie retains quite a lot of Abby’s apparent confusion about what stories are and how they work. Unreliability is a fascinating and tricky conceit for novelists and filmmakers. It should not be confused with bad writing.

There is a lot of that here, and also, to confuse matters further, a lot of good acting. It is poignant and sometimes weirdly thrilling to watch Isaac, Wilde and the other cast members — I should also mention Laia Costa and Sergio Peris-Mencheta, though they might prefer that I didn’t — commit with such fervor and seriousness to such utter balderdash. Their efforts and the soft-and-shiny, sun-drenched look of Brett Pawlak’s cinematography might fool the inattentive into mistaking “Life Itself” for a good movie.

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