A movie can be absorbing or significant because of its craft, its ambitions, or what its appearance at a certain point in time may augur, even if it doesn’t fully cohere or completely satisfy. Call it a mixed bag, a near miss, or a guilty pleasure, but sometimes the flaws throw into greater relief the qualities that make a film striking. Life Itself is writer-director Dan Fogelman’s second indie feature, following the Al Pacino vehicle Danny Collins (2015), which had its admirers but was a box office disappointment. These days the filmmaker is much better known as the creator and producer of the critically lauded award-winning NBC series This Is Us, to which Life Itself will inevitably be compared.
In Chapter Two we meet the Dempseys’ daughter, Dylan, a precocious youngster who grows into a 21-year-old punk musician (Olivia Cooke) whose default mode is anger. Minus the plot twists and reversals that make Chapter One so riveting, this second part is dull by comparison, and the thematic concept of the “unreliable narrator” echoes only in the prevarications of Dylan and her protective grandfather (Mandy Patinkin). As genre, this dreary coming-of-age section doesn’t mesh well with either the preceding chapter, or the next, which is a dazzler.
Directed by Dan Fogelman. In English and subtitled Spanish. Rated R. 118 minutes.
