A collection of love stories spanning two continents and three generations, LIFE ITSELF proves not only desperately maudlin and judderingly contrived, but also a masterclass in how not to write a screenplay or how to play on the emotions of your audience in anything except the most cynical fashion.

There’s an accusation sometimes levelled at film criticism, that it serves only to take pleasure in the misfortune of others, a second-hand art form glorying in failure and failing to give credit where due. Let me be unequivocal on this: I take no pleasure in tearing down LIFE ITSELF, when I can see on screen the efforts of so many quality actors to make a film that’s profound, philosophical and deeply affecting. I can only hope that I can in some way elucidate enough of the film’s fundamental failings to serve as a guide for future generations to avoid the same mistakes.

We open on the face of a young man (Jake Robinson), with a narration from Samuel L. Jackson that breaks the fourth wall almost instantly. But it turns out that our protagonist is the person the young man’s talking to, Anette Bening, except it’s really all about Oscar Isaac, and within the first ten minutes the plot has contorted itself through so many artificial constructs that it’s already put up barriers to our emotional investment.

The film is divided into chapters, each of which tell all or part of a love story of some kind. We initially follow Will (Isaac) as he falls in love with Abby (Olivia Wilde) in New York. At the same time in a rural town in southern Spain, Saccione (Antonio Banderas) appoints a new foreman to his olive orchards, Javier (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), at the same time as he woos his new girlfriend Isabel (Laia Costa). We also see chapters in the lives of troubled young band member Dylan (Olivia Cooke) as she spurns the chance to go to college, and of Rodrigo (Alex Monner) as he experiences the most important day in his life.

… steeped in human tragedy, displaying almost a fetish for gloom and human misery …

LIFE ITSELF is so deeply, fundamentally flawed on every level the only challenge is to try to cover as many of those flaws as possible. It’s wrong on the surface: Will and Abby’s relationship is shown through her contrived college thesis on unreliable narrators and they have a cat called Fuckface and go to fancy dress parties as Pulp Fiction’s Vincent and Mia, acting out the adrenaline scene while Chuck Berry plays in the background. This isn’t how people behave, it’s how characters in a stale romantic comedy written by a first-year college student behave, and it shuns credibility at every turn. If you’re going to give your characters a fascination with pop culture, try to make it feel like they didn’t just Google all of the references twenty minutes before the scene.

But it’s even more wrong beneath the surface: the film wallows in misery, yet it never succeeds in imbuing a single moment with anything approaching authenticity. LIFE ITSELF is steeped in human tragedy, displaying almost a fetish for gloom and human misery, but both the central moment which connects the stories and all of those moments of lesser misfortune which surround it are so glaringly telegraphed that they can only cause disbelief at how contrived they are, rather than the emotional payoff they appear to be seeking. That’s compounded by the choice of moral: that you need to embrace the lightness and good in life, despite the misery that it’s filled with.

That it does this from a Bob Dylan song which even provides the name of one of the characters is hackneyed enough; that it feels the need to ram this down your throat with both soundtrack and voiceover, never having the confidence in its audience of even the barest semblance of intelligence that this will be apparent without being force fed to them. It’s the equivalent of making a two hour film about how great omelettes are, before showing you an hour and a half of battery farming chickens and then an unconnected story about the tragedy of needing to break eggs to make them. Oh, and the farmer probably gets typhoid.

Even the film’s production flaws stand out like a sore thumb: the film is clearly set across three generations, but we then see those characters over the course of each generation, so that the film likely encompasses a timespan of at least seven decades. When characters are clearly using modern iPhones in the middle of this timeline, it adds yet another veneer of falsehood to a film already laden down with disbelief.

The film is filled with desperate contrivances and world class coincidences, but rather than embracing the magical realism of such events, they become almost happenstance, their unlikeliness surrendering in the face of such wanton wretchedness at almost evert other turn. Quite what has prompted writer / director Dan Fogelman to this is anyone’s guess; if he’s experienced a similar level of disaster in his personal life then he has my sympathy and I applaud his optimism.

But, regardless of whatever’s brought this to the screen, it’s heartbreaking to have to tear down Fogelman’s work, because the acting across the board is never anything less than utterly committed to this desperately misbegotten cause. Oscar Isaac, Olivia Cooke, Mandy Patinkin and Laia Costa are the best among a catalogue of strong, committed performances, but regrettably even their efforts can’t salvage this manipulative, insincere disaster.