Life Itself (2018)

Ah, to be young, in love and expecting a child!

(2018) Romance (Amazon) Olivia Wilde, Oscar Isaac, Annette Bening, Antonio Banderas, Mandy Patinkin, Jean Smart, Olivia Cooke, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Laia Costa, Alex Monner, Samuel L. Jackson, Isabel Durant, Lorenza Izzo, Jake Robinson, Adrián Marrero, Kya Cruse, Charlie Thurston, Gabby Bryan, Jordana Rose, Caitlin Carmichael, Bryant Carroll, Carmela Lloret. Directed by Dan Fogelman

 

Life Itself (not to be confused with the 2014 Roger Ebert bio-documentary) has some mighty tall aspirations. It means to show us through all the pain and suffering through life, we can find solace in that love finds us because it is destined to. I’m sure there are plenty of lonely people who would take exception to that theory.

Will (Isaac) and Abby (Wilde) are a young couple who met in college, fell in love, got married and are expecting a child. Or, at least, they were; we see most of that through flashbacks and we meet Will during a therapy session with a sympathetic psychiatrist (Bening) who is trying to guide Will through the ruins of his life after Abby leaves it. We meet their daughter Dylan (Cooke), a petulant young girl who fronts a punk band but is hiding great pain and not hiding it very well. We also meet Rodrigo (Monner), a young boy traumatized at a young age and brought up by a mother (Costa) who is afflicted with cancer and two fathers – his biological dad (Peris-Mencheta) and the wealthy landowner (Banderas) for whom his father works and who has been part of his life since the beginning. We also meet Elena (Izzo), the narrator who has connections with nearly all of these people in some way.

This is a movie that is riddled with sorrow; plenty of the folks I just introduced you to meet tragic ends, but there is also a lot of joy in the relationships with spouses, parents and caring friends. It feels like Fogelman has tried to cram way too much into the movie which helps to give it the feel that it’s going on too long. Some astute viewers will note that Fogelman has become well-known for the TV show This Is Us which this resembles in tone and construction which is probably why my wife likes this movie so much.

Most critics don’t, however, and I count myself among them. Like life itself, the movie has problems and triumphs in equal measure. There are some nice performances – Costa, Isaac, Wilde and Patinkin stand out, and Jackson in what amounts to a cameo at the very beginning of the movie might have caused problems by making viewers think this was going to be a different kind of movie than it actually was. Frankly, I thought that Fogelman should have stuck with the Sam Jackson movie; it’s a much better one than the one he actually made.

That’s not to say that there isn’t some form of catharsis throughout the movie for you to hold onto. There certainly is, but the tone shifts are so abrupt and violent that we are left feeling curiously off-balance, which is kind of what we watch movies to get away from. Life Itself is too much like life itself in many ways and I don’t think most of us love life itself enough to want to watch a movie about it.

REASONS TO SEE: Jackson is incandescent in his brief appearance.
REASONS TO AVOID: Excessively maudlin.
FAMILY VALUES: There is more than a bit of profanity, some sexual references, some violent images and brief drug use.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Fogelman listened extensively to Bob Dylan’s 1997 Time Out of Mind album in order to set the mood of the film which blends love and melancholy. In fact, the track “Love Sick” plays over the opening credits.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Amazon
CRITICAL MASS: As of 1/9/20: Rotten Tomatoes: 14% positive reviews: Metacritic: 21/100
COMPARISON SHOPPING: This Is Us
FINAL RATING: 5/10
NEXT: The House With the Clock In the Walls

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A Man Called Ove (En man som heter Ove)

Parvaneh and Ove make their daily rounds.

(2015) Dramedy (Music Box) Rolf Lassgärd, Bahar Pars, Tobias Almborg, Ida Engvoll, Börje Lundberg, Chatarina Larsson, Holger Hastén, Ola Hedén, Stefan Gödicke, Sofie Gallerspáng, Filip Berg, Zozan Akgun, Viktor Baagøe, Simon Edenroth, Anna-Lena Bergelin, Poyan Karimi, Nelly Jamarani, Simeon Lindgren, Maja Rung, Jessica Olsson Directed by Hannes Holm

 

As we make our way through life, we are sometimes fortunate enough to find that perfect someone, someone who compliments us and completes us. That person makes our life so much more satisfying; we share all our highs and lows with that person. We can’t imagine life without them. When that person is taken from us too soon, we feel an emptiness that can never be filled, like a part of us is missing never to return. It is understandable that when that happens our thoughts turn to leaving this life.

Ove (Lassgärd) is 59 years old and six months a widower. A crotchety, grumpy sort, he lives in a quiet development in Sweden where the homeowners association – once headed by Ove himself – has forbidden driving on the streets of the development, and requires gates to be closed, dogs to be leashed and bikes to be properly stored. Ove makes daily rounds to make sure these rules are adhered to, although they rarely are it seems. He has worked for the train authority for 43 years, starting out by cleaning the trains when he’s 16 years old. Now, his job is being automated and he’s being put out to pasture.

He’s ready to end it all and join his wife Sonja (Engvoll) in the hereafter. However his attempts to take his own life are continuously interrupted, particularly by Parvaneh (Pars), the Iranian-born (and very pregnant) wife of Patrik (Almborg) who is Swedish. The couple has just moved in across the street with their adorable but noisy children which irritates Ove no end. To make matters worse, Patrik is hopeless around the house so Parvaneh turns to Ove to help, borrowing a ladder (which Patrik promptly falls off from, requiring a hospital trip that rescues Ove from yet another suicide attempt) and eventually asking him to help her get her driver’s license. The two begin to bond as friends in a kind of father-daughter way but still definitely friends. They enlist Ove to babysit and he begins to connect with the little ones.

We see Ove and his relationship with Sonja in a series of flashbacks that are cleverly disguised as his life passing before his eyes during his various suicide attempts. Eventually he begins to respond to those around him, adopting a cat he’d been trying to chase away – while we discover what it was that made him so bitter in the first place.

Part of why this works – a significant part – is the performance of Lassgärd which is quite special. The cranky old man is a global cinematic trope which extends back to the silent days, but Lassgärd imbues Ove with a dignity that makes him larger than life, but at the same time allows his humanity to show sometimes unexpectedly. It is the latter bit that makes Ove real and relatable; he has been through some real tribulation and through it all he had Sonja by his side to bring out the angels of his better nature, but with her gone he has fallen into despair and loneliness. He knows what other think of him and while he sloughs it off, deep down he hurts. Lassgärd brings that all out to the surface and makes Ove vulnerable and intimidating at once.

There’s a scene where Ove is dressed down by one of the dreaded “white shirts” – his code for bureaucratic bullies who have antagonized him all his life, going back to when he was a young man living in his late father’s home where he’d grown up and a council member who wanted the land his home stood on, condemned his house and allowed it to burn with all his possessions in it, ordering the fire brigade not to put it out. Had it have been me I’d have thrown the bastard into the house and say “I’ll bet he wants you to put it out now.”

The relationship between Ove and Parvaneh is also very natural and realistic. She’s sweet and caring and she doesn’t allow Ove to bully her. Of all the residents of the development, she seems to be the only one who sees past his gruff behavior and realizes that there’s a good man buried under all that. She hears him refer to nearly everyone else (particularly her husband) as “idiots,” which seems to be a fairly common epithet in Ove’s world. In my more curmudgeonly moments I can relate to the sentiment.

I can get why some may have difficulty with this movie; it is, after all, unashamedly manipulative. Some people really don’t like having their heartstrings tugged and I get that, but maybe I was just in the right place for it. I was truly moved by Ove and his life, and when the end of the movie came I was bawling like a cranky baby. Movies like this one used to be called “tear-jerkers” and they came by the epithet honestly.

Watching Ove’s life unspool over the course of the film is satisfying. Everything makes sense here and while some might feel that some of the tragedies are a little contrived, I thought that it was very much a highlight reel; we get a sense of the day to day but like most of us, the big events are what stick in the memory. There are some moments that are shocking and unexpected; life doesn’t always come at us from an angle we see clearly. Sometimes, we are taken by surprise.

This is definitely one of my favorite films so far this year. I know not everyone will agree with me but I found it cathartic and touching and real. When the tears came, they were come by honestly. I don’t know that I’d want to hang out with Ove – it would be like hanging with a grouchy bear – but I really loved getting to know him and seeing his life. I don’t do this very often, but after seeing this on a press screener, I’ve made plans to go see it at the Enzian and bring more family along. It’s that good.

REASONS TO GO: A strong performance by Lassgärd. A very poignant but sweet and sometimes stirring film. There are some unexpected incidents that make the film even more powerful. Very much a “slice of life.”
REASONS TO STAY: Some may find it manipulative.
FAMILY VALUES: There are some images that are disturbing as well as a few brief instances of mild profanity and a couple of instances of violence.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: This is the official Swedish submission to the next Academy Awards Foreign Language film competition in 2017.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 10/21/16: Rotten Tomatoes: 93% positive reviews. Metacritic: 70/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared
FINAL RATING: 10/10
NEXT: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Higher Ground

Vera Farmiga purchases a good review.

(2011) Drama (Sony Classics) Joshua Leonard, Norbert Leo Butz, Michael Chernus, Vera Farmiga, McKenzie Turner, Donna Murphy, John Hawkes, Bill Irwin, Taissa Farmiga, Boyd Holbrook, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Reagan Leonard, Lucy Owen, Nina Arianda, Dagmara Dominczyk, Molly Hawkey, Warren Haynes, Sean Mahon, Natalie Thomas, Deborah Hedwall. Directed by Vera Farmiga

Karl Marx once described religion as the “opiate of the masses.” There is some truth to this, although as with most pronouncements about faith, religion, belief and the lacks thereof, it comes off as rather simplistic. Religion is many things to many people.

Corinne Walker (V. Farmiga) got married early in life. As a teen (T. Farmiga) she got pregnant by would-be rocker Ethan Miller (Holbrook) and, as Springsteen once said, man, that was all she wrote. While traveling by bus to a gig, an accident changes all their lives and in the aftermath Corinne and Ethan find religion.

Now a grown-up Ethan (Leonard) and Corinne live in what could be characterized as a Christian commune; a community of evangelical sorts in the Midwest for whom folk singing and Bible study occupy large portions of their time. Now with two daughters, Corinne has not questioned her faith and has been a devout follower of Christ.

But doubts are beginning to rear their heads. She feels constricted by the traditional roles assigned her and when she attempts to voice an opinion she feels the disapproval of her community, particularly from the women. Her lone confidante is Annika (Dominczyk), a free spirit who talks frankly with Corinne about her sex life and her female needs. Corinne craves these talks like Robinson Crusoe craves companionship.

But when a further test besets Corinne and the religious community, her faith is tested to the breaking point. When does faith become blind obedience, and how long do you blindly obey before making your own mind up about faith?

Now these sounds like questions that an atheistic Hollywood would be using to attack Christianity but I assure you that’s not what’s happening in this movie. Rather, what Farmiga and screenwriter Carolyn S. Briggs (who based her screenplay on a book based on her own experiences) are trying to do is to examine the nature of faith, when it is appropriate to question it and the powerful role it plays in all our lives.

To the credit of writer and director, the believers are not painted with the fanatic paintbrush that believers are often painted with in Hollywood; rather those of faith come by it honestly, either through tragedy or self-examination or more to the point, both. Also to the credit of writer and director, there is no judgment going on here either. Religious faith isn’t portrayed as a crutch but the fact that it can be isn’t ruled out. Instead, it is portrayed as part of the tapestry of our lives. In some ways it reminded me of the 1991 apocalyptic movie The Rapture in which a hedonistic Mimi Rogers is brought to faith by a gentle, loving man whom she later marries, then loses it when her husband is senselessly murdered. While the events her are less epochal, the examination of faith has the same honesty to it.

Farmiga, whose younger sister plays her as a teen, carries the movie. Her Corinne is never shrill but she isn’t meek either. She has questions that need answering and they require answers that aren’t “mind your place.” Corinne is not the sort of woman who can fit in to a mold and indeed most women aren’t. However, there are some that can and do, and some who believe it is their religious duty to do so. That is the part of faith that can be difficult to understand.

The odd thing here is that while these are based on someone’s actual experiences, there is kind of a contrived feeling to the plot – as in that certain characters show up at crucial times when they are needed, or events happen at exactly the right time to have maximum impact on Corinne’s faith and doubts. While the movie doesn’t stereotype the faithful here other than perhaps the disapproving pastor’s wife, it doesn’t really explore them as people as much as I would have liked and the questions of faith that are raised here don’t get more than a very surface examination. While that does leave room for finding your own answers, you don’t get a sense of what the filmmakers think of all this and I would have really liked that insight as well.

This had the potential of being an important movie and indeed I do admire it for raising questions that Hollywood – and independent film for that matter – doesn’t tackle and while it ends up being more or less a morality play without really explaining the morality, you do have to admire its gumption if not its execution.

WHY RENT THIS: Doesn’t sink to stereotypes. Farmiga is a compelling lead.
WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Feels a bit contrived. Tackles the subject in a cursory manner.
FAMILY VALUES: There’s some foul language and sexual situations, as well as adult themes.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Farmiga directed the film as well as acted in it while five months pregnant.
NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: There are a couple of outtakes and a production diary.
BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $841,733 on a $2M production budget.
SITES TO SEE: Netflix (DVD rental only), Amazon (purchase only), iTunes (purchase only), Vudu (purchase only),  Flixster (purchase only), Target Ticket (unavailable)
COMPARISON SHOPPING: The Rapture
FINAL RATING: 5.5/10
NEXT: Toast