Life Itself Review: 2 Ups & 8 Downs

4. Saccione's Introduction Is Cringe-Inducing

Mid-way through the film, Life Itself comes to a full-stop and switches narrative gears completely, focusing on an entirely different story with entirely different characters. Which would be a welcome reprise, if the second half wasn't possibly even worse than the first.

Transporting the narrative to Spain, this chapter begins with Antonio Banderas' Saccione (owner of an olive farm) having a sit-down talk with Sergio Peris-Mencheta's Javier (worker on said olive farm). They sit together as Saccione delivers a several-minutes-long monologue about his family's history and why he owns the olive farm in the first place. Over the course of just a few minutes, he spells out his entire life story to a man he has, by his own admission, hardly ever talked to before.

In response, he expects Javier to tell him his own life story as well. And when Javier refuses, saying he has no big story to tell, Saccione is disappointed. And somehow, Fogelman expects us to side with Saccione. After this sequence, Javier goes on to fail as a husband and a father, with Saccione taking his place, and the film plays as if viewers should rejoice in this fact as if he deserves to be punished.

Not only is this sequence dull and brings the film to a complete stand-still, but it is also problematically representative of Fogelman's entire ethos. Vulnerable displays of emotions are good and anything less than blatant heart-string plucking is bad and deserves to be punished. Heck, Fogelman practically said as much in response to reviews like this(https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/dan-fogelman-fires-back-at-film-critics-poor-life-reviews-1145929).