“Life Itself” thinks you’re stupid.
Or, if not stupid, unable to understand how a movie should work.
It’s a movie made for people who can’t be trusted to understand any storytelling unless it’s not just spoon-fed but ladled on, piled high, and explained via montage and voiceover.
It’s the kind of movie that includes commercials for itself by using its own title within the dialogue multiple times.
Ostensibly, it’s about unreliable narration; if you don’t know what that is, “Life Itself” will explain it via monologue 10 minutes after delivering a ham-fisted demo of it in action.
However, the movie uses unreliable narration as a way to pass off poor storytelling as a feature, not a bug.But mostly, “Life Itself” is about death, with Fogelman co-opting the formula that made his television series “This Is Us” such a four-quadrant hit: twisty, twisted stories
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