Avis des critiques

In this excruciatingly contrived and ill-conceived multigenerational saga, the writer and director Dan Fogelman (the creator of the TV tearjerker “This Is Us”) dispatches his characters with all the feeling reserved for chess pieces.

So perversely jaw-dropping in its attempts to extort feelings out of us that it could almost be a black comedy. But no, this one is playing it straight.

“Life Itself,” Dan Fogelman’s inadvertently hilarious new movie, reminded me of a line from “The Importance of Being Earnest” Oscar Wilde’s deliberately hilarious old play. “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

Fogelman, who’s found TV success with this formula as the creator of NBC’s This Is Us, brings neither style nor substance to his second feature, a vapid exercise in narrative kitsch that spans two languages and multiple decades and love stories.

It is sentimental and sprawling, which are not necessarily bad things, but also manipulative and contrived, which very much are.