The one thing an audience member would never like to hear when purchasing a ticket is “Oh, you’ll be in there by yourself! Enjoy the movie!” This, perhaps, would cause cynicism in most viewers. What kind of film can draw in only one viewer the night after it hits theaters? The answer would be the drama/romance film “Life Itself.”

Television seems to be a much more welcome format for director Dan Fogelman (“This is Us”), as he seems to struggle with telling a story in two hours rather than 30 minutes over the course of a year. “Life Itself” documents how coincidence caused two families to comes together, but that is not what it is really about. Imagine an annoying but well-intentioned drunk man at the bar, putting his arm obnoxiously around your shoulder, providing constant layman advice about life. Like this man’s rumblings, many of the scenes are simply windows to make very weak philosophical points and flat attempts to make the audience sad.

The film acts as both the drunken dad with rudimentary life advice and the nagging mom who must make sure that the audience always gets how very deep and serious the movie is. In one very painful example, the film implies it has an unreliable narrator by showing a drawn-out scene in which a character talks about how deep the trope of an unreliable narrator is, providing an awkward stop in the flow of the film to ask, “Do you get it yet?” Sadly, by forcing all of its pretentious sub-context front and center, it has the opposite effect.

Pretentious is probably the best word to describe this movie, as it excitedly abandons all sense of normal narrative structure to tell its story, jumping from character to character with different storytelling modes. This format works well in an episode of a TV show, where one episode can contain a single story that works without needing to worry about the larger one it is a part of. However, in a two-hour time frame, the enormous cast of characters in the story ends up grasping toward very brief and anti-climatic endings in order to make room for the rest of the cast to get screen time, to the point where the movie just leans in close, whiskey still strong on its breath, and says, “Life just be like that sometimes.”

The biggest crime is that the actors are a joy to watch at times, and the writing can be very funny, which would lead to some likeable characters if all that charisma was not pushed aside for more melodrama. It is almost comical how similar the film gets to being like a soap opera. It starts at a relatively good point about a man telling his life story to a therapist in NYC, until halfway through, when it becomes a very po-faced drama about a Spanish family working on an olive farm.

Many audiences will find things to like about “Life Itself,” such as the funny writing,  great acting and phenomenal camera work. However, underneath all of it is a boring and uninspired story that will slowly erode any of its good will by the second act. It refuses to trust its audience to make sense of the subtext and spreads a story that could have worked with four leads by pushing it to the breaking point and having 10. “Life Itself” will leave one feeling hollow and waiting for the lights to dim.

Image from Amazon Studios via YouTube.com