Day six. The winds of change are blowing wild and free. You ain't seen nothing like me yet. (5/1/19)

Cheating a bit. Doing tomorrow's now.

Call it a review. Call it what you like. 

(Soundtrack: Bod Dylan's 'Time Out of Mind' album. For reasons that will eventually become obvious.)

I've just finished watching 'Life Itself'. Literally, just. The time between the end of the film is the time taken to turn the Mac back on. And the time to look at imdb and try and figure out how the metacritic score could be so wrong. 

'Life Itself' is one of those features that Sky debut at (apparently) the same time it's released to cinema. (Though the Guardian review would indicate that this may have actually happened last September.)

You could think of this as a generational saga. Though that won't be immediately evident. You could think of it as a portmanteau piece; three/four/possibly five interrelated stories with separate moods in the same film, connected in a way that won't be overly clear until revealed in the denouement. The only problem with that is that the film lets you know what those connections are as it goes along. Before hitting you with the connection you didn't see coming. Straight after the connection that you'd kind of guessed for a while.

We start with a voiceover. With a writer. With a script. With a narration by a familiar voice. With an introduction to our hero. Who isn't actually our hero, and may not even be the hero of his own story.

We start with a tragedy. Though, possibly we don't.

We move to an in therapy Oscar Isaac; a man whose wife has left him. We know where we're going. Until we don't. Until the rug is viciously pulled from under our feet.

Things change.

It might be a film about the unreliable narrator. You'd possibly think that. Right up until the point that the narrator tells you this is all about the unreliable narrator. At which point you can only ask yourself whether you should trust the narrator on that point.

Time fractures, characters move in and out, backwards and forwards in their own lives and in the structure of the film until it's ready to present you with the reason the film is here in the first place.

The writer, Ben Fogelman, creator of This Is Us and Crazy Stupid Love had, according to one of the two appalling, sniffy reviews the Guardian handed out, pre-empted criticism of the film by defending the use of sentiment in cinema: "I made this film so people could walk out of a theater feeling better than they did when they went in." This, apparently, is a poor ideal.

Wendy Ide (Guardian, 5th January 2019) described this as "a stupid person's idea of a clever person".

Fine. I'm stupid, then. Because, I will happily tell you this much: I'm in awe of this film. It's a lovely, magnificent, heartfelt piece of work that throws a light on the human condition, what love means and how we survive tragedy. The character work from both the utterly impeccable cast, and the taut, smart script itself, is wonderful; the playing with time, the use of non-linear narrative and the breaking of cinematic walls zips and bounces, keeps you guessing, warns you not to get attached to characters before making you more attached to them than you were previously. When the huge reveal you thought you were waiting for hits thirty minutes in you wonder where the rest of the film can go. The next thirty seconds are shocking.

And, added to all this, the film centres round Bob Dylan's late period classic, now twenty years old itself, and the reception that critics gave it at the time; centres on the fact that at the centre of all the rumination on age and mortality there was a very straightforward, classically structured, simply, perfectly phrased love song. A love song called 'To Make You Feel My Love'. That the critics thought this simplicity was out of place amongst the depths.

Twenty years ago, the critics were very, very wrong about a Dylan song that found a life that far outlasted their views.

Perhaps that should have been a message to them.