Life Itself

Dan Fogel­man real­ly wants to talk about Bob Dylan’s 1997 album, ​‘Time Out of Mind’. Specif­i­cal­ly, Dan Fogel­man wants to talk about track nine, war­bling bal­lad ​‘Make You Feel My Love’, cement­ed into pop cul­ture con­scious­ness through 20 years of chart-both­er­ing covers.

Such is the inten­si­ty of Fogelman’s feel­ings about this sub­ject, it per­me­ates every scene of his debut fea­ture, Life Itself, a sprawl­ing, over­ly-com­pli­cat­ed sto­ry in five acts chart­ing the inter­con­nect­ed lives of the Dempsey and González fam­i­lies across two con­ti­nents and sev­er­al generations.

The sto­ry opens on Will Dempsey (Oscar Isaac), who’s tak­en to see­ing a ther­a­pist (Annette Ben­ning) fol­low­ing the break­down of his mar­riage to Abby (Olivia Wilde). Fogel­man rearranges the nar­ra­tive in an attempt to mir­ror Will’s own frac­tured state of mind, and Isaac, for his part, does a good line in bleary-eyed des­per­a­tion – a bit like if Llewyn Davis was a sanc­ti­mo­nious millennial.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, just as we’re set­tling into his sto­ry, Fogel­man jerks away towards Olivia Cooke’s brat­ty young punk Dylan, and then, most baf­fling­ly of all, trans­ports the film to Spain for what feels like an eter­ni­ty, focussing on a maudlin soap opera play­ing out between Isabel González (Laia Cos­ta) and Vin­cent Sac­cione (Anto­nio Banderas).

In his furi­ous attempt to con­nect all the mov­ing parts, Fogel­man sac­ri­fices any hope of earned res­o­nance, instead rely­ing on a bar­rage of tur­moil which amounts to emo­tion­al bat­tery. Add to this the film’s dat­ed gen­der pol­i­tics, and it becomes increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to com­pre­hend why it was made, let alone why it was made now.

Still, it’s impres­sive that Fogel­man man­ages to waste such a tal­ent­ed cast in so spec­tac­u­lar a man­ner, all in pur­suit of what amounts to an unwant­ed defence of a Bob Dylan song that has been on every wed­ding playlist since the late 1990s.