A Beautiful Life Review

I’m so frustrated having to review A Beautiful Life, a Danish-language Netflix Original movie directed by Mehdi Avaz and written by Stefan Jaworski. The film is about Elliot (Christopher), a fisherman with a hidden talent as a singer-songwriter who is discovered one night by Suzanne, the widow of the greatest Danish musician of all-time (Christine Albeck Børge) who convinces him to record a song with her daughter Lilly (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas).

There is so much devastating pressure to be a successful musician. Forget about the ups and downs of gigging and making a living, your entire career, and tied to it, your self-worth, is based on a skill that you are either born with the ability to sharpen to perfection or you aren’t. If you’re not a good singer or don’t have an ear for music, no amount of training can turn you into something that others are just blessed with from the start. And even with all that skill, if you can’t channel it into music that moves other people? Forget about it. You have a hobby, not a career.

As a professional musician myself, Elliot’s fear of diving into a career in music is palpable. I spend every day of my life questioning whether I’m good enough, whether I’m better than other people who do the same thing I do, and whether that even matters. All the external validation in the world is rarely enough to keep me from guessing whether I’ll last in this career as long as I want to and whether what I’m producing is even having the impact I want it to. Like Elliot, I have a well of experiences to draw from but a hard time tapping into them, something A Beautiful Life understands well as we watch Elliot and Lilly spend the first half of the movie dancing around their emotions and the devastating pasts that hold them back.

But A Beautiful Life suffers enormously from its brevity, its contrived conflict, and its corny antagonist. There is just not enough time to get emotionally invested in Elliot or Lilly as individuals or as a couple. We’re told but never shown the pain they both suffer from their pasts. We’re told but never shown that they’ve both struggled to find their places in the world. They’re obviously destined for one another the second Lilly locks eyes on Elliot, but when they finally collide, the romance is dull, the sex is prude, and there is nary a spark lit in a single scene thereafter.

I’m frankly sick of movies, regardless of their platform, their star power, or their run times that cram two characters together without doing the diligence of making me fall for them. If you’re going to center romance in your story, I have to fall in love too. I can’t just be told that these two characters are suddenly in love. It’s not enough. Beautiful people and beautiful music are one thing, but a beautiful life requires a sustained emotional connection and moments over time, not just a splash in the pan after one raw conversation and ta-da — they’re in love.

The movie had all the right elements to make me love these two separately and together, but for once in my life, I wish it had been a longer movie so we could spend more time watching them grow together. Plus, the biggest source of their conflict comes to a head with a big twist that screams conflict for the sake of conflict. There’s so much room for organic and deep conflict between these two potentially complicated characters, but instead, the movie opts for the most tactless and disinteresting route possible.

Instead, we waste our time with an absolutely aggravating best friend Ollie (Sebastian Jessen) as the principal antagonist. Ollie is the reason Elliot is in this situation in the first place. Ollie has a gig singing and Elliot is supposed to play guitar for him. But Ollie isn’t a very good singer and loses Suzanne’s attention, so he gets flustered and Elliot jumps in to save him, wowing everyone there, Suzanne and Lilly included. So when Ollie comes back into the picture later, he’s rightfully angry that Elliot is getting the chance at stardom that Ollie had actually worked hard for. It’s a miserably unfair industry. The hardest workers don’t always win over the people with the purest talent, or even just the best looks.

I appreciate this part of Elliot’s conflict with Ollie. But on the other and far more pressing hand, Ollie is an incredibly annoying, trite, and irredeemable character. He’s obnoxious. He says terribly insensitive and unfunny things at every turn. And Elliot can’t help but get wrapped into his orbit. It’s irritating to watch. It isn’t fun. I can empathize with Elliot here, of course. Ollie is his only real friend and it’s hard to recognize when your only friend sucks. I’ve been there. But as a writing choice, it just ruins an entire portion of the movie because it is so deeply unfun to have to watch. There are infinite other ways that Elliot could have gone through a crisis of identity or confidence and that he and Lilly could have found themselves at odds, but instead, she gets shoved to the side for a conflict with a boring and rude man and Elliot gets his opportunity for growth wasted by a massive step backward only to return to par when it’s all over. And then it gets to the end.

The movie is filled with some good songs. Mixing-wise, I was put off at first by how badly it sounds like the music was recorded separately and dubbed over. But the end brings forth one last surprise song that almost made me forget how annoying the twist was. Almost. It’s preceded by one well-act and one finely-acted emotional beat that would have been substantially elevated if I actually felt any connection to or between the characters involved. But the worst part of it all is the flashback montage. There is so little time spent showing Elliot and Lilly being romantic that it keeps cutting to the same scene over and over and then making up new scenes we never even saw. Why didn’t we see them? Why couldn’t we have those actual scenes? And why do I need a flashback to something I just saw 40 minutes ago?

I want to like A Beautiful Life so badly. It touches on so many of the deepest and most emotional parts of artistry and love but only ever skims their surfaces, trading time that could have been spent building out the emotional depths of its core characters for a nuisance of an antagonist and a contrived curveball. It’s such a shame how much potential is left on the table here.

A Beautiful Life is streaming now on Netflix.