This movie has such an ingenious premise. A story in layers, in which in Part One you learn—slowly—that your main character is unreliable and destroyed. The source of his anguish is his wife, who wrote her thesis with the title of something like The Unreliable Narrator. Her conclusion was how the most unreliable narrator is life itself.
It was one of the most original and brilliant openings we’d seen in a long time.
From there it scans forward to the next generation, to two different young people affected by what happened to the couple in Part One. It had the problem of taking place farther into the future than our own present day, but dealt decently well with this challenge by making the more elaborate of the two stories take place half a world away—in rural Spain.
If it had ended soon after these explorations, it would have been a fine ending. The crafting was clever. All it needed was an unexpected and meaningful way to bring these two lives back together—to say, “Huh. Would you look at that? Life is such a dang unreliable narrator. But doesn’t it come with the coolest twists?”
Instead, I’m truly sad to say, someone had the idea to plaster a bad Hollywood ending onto the caboose. To achieve this, they used a Dickens-worthy coincidence to have the two young people just “run into each other in NYC” and then “fall in love forever.” Giving rise to another generation, a granddaughter annoyingly sincere. Now we have a young person studying the lives of the past two generations to write a memoir. For no strong reason. Soon she’s giving a long speech—on the heels of an excessive speech from the Spanish setting—under the guise of a book reading. All of which serves to destroy what had been so nicely set up. Our premise, delicate and deft, now gets beaten to an starchy pulp. We can’t relate to this new character. We don’t understand why time is passing quickly in these lives and yet the setting doesn’t change—it all looks present day. We didn’t need this last generation at all.
A shame. Yet the film has some absolute gems to it. I loved how the analysis of the college thesis was that it failed, with her professor claiming she veered from literary criticism into the realm of some other discipline, with elements of nebulous mysticism. (Isn’t that the perfect thing to have a literature professor say??) And how fabulous—that the premise of the film is a college thesis that was crushed. After it was introduced to us as a brilliant break-through for our stunning heroine. Proof, right there, of how life is an unreliable narrator.
Having just looked up what other people have had to say about this movie, I find it intriguing that critics mostly panned it, but viewers are mostly loving it. I agree with critics who say it’s a movie that says less the harder it tries. Yet it seems throwing the baby out with the bathwater to focus on the bad ending to what could have been a tremendous film. Too bad Dan Fogelman didn’t have the wisdom—or maybe it was clout—to stick to an ending true to the ingenious opening.