Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I Can’t Live Without You’ on Netflix, a Toothless Spanish Comedy About Cell Phone Addiction

The title of Spanish comedy I Can’t Live Without You (now on Netflix) is double-edged: The sentiment is aimed at the main character’s wife AND his cell phone. Spanish TV vet Adrian Suar plays a hopeless tech addict, and Paz Vega ( Talk to Her ) is the wife who, tired of playing second fiddle to text messages, drops his ass like a call in a rural area where a cell tower can find no purchase. The premise seems ripe for a little satire or social commentary, but does it have the ambition to say anything we haven’t already heard?

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The Gist: The credit sequences shows herds of people in various settings – airports, streets, stores, even CHILDREN on PLAYGROUNDS where they should be PLAYING – staring down at their phones. Read: Society has gone to hell! Then, we meet our protagonist in a scene that’s admittedly pretty familiar to many of us: Carlos (Saur) wakes up, immediately reaches for his phone, and panics when he can’t find it. The scene becomes a heavily metaphorical microcosm of his life: He finds the phone under the sheets and his sleeping wife Adela (Vega) rolls over on top of it and he gets affectionate with her not because he’s stricken with desire for her, but desire to check his email or whatever. Is this Strike One or Strike 100? Dunno, but she’s not at all thrilled to be second fiddle to a got dam screen.

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Context: Carlos and Adela have been together for a couple decades. The empty nest awaits: They have two kids who are about to move to Milan for college. She’s a doctor and he’s an office-filler at an investment firm or something. Transitions, transitions, everywhere transitions. Whatever it is he does – corporate acquisitions or something? Who can tell? – the important thing is, he’s on the brink of a big-time movie cliche, namely, he’s about to be named Partner At The Firm. And THAT’S why he needs to duck out of Adela’s sister’s wedding to make an important call on a Saturday afternoon. He has the wedding rings in his pocket for no reason I could discern. And when Adela tracks him down she snatches the phone and throws it in the pond, he dives in after it like a total dad-blamed idgit moron.

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Carlos doesn’t seem to understand the symbolism of the day: Marriage, commitment, contentment. Or lack thereof of the last two, as the case may be. Adela packs her bags and ignores Carlos’ desperate pleas. He goes to a cell-phone addiction support group – is it populated with loveable goofballs? Of course it is! – and is tentative at first, but before you know it, he finds himself in a montage where he does completely ludicrous stuff like biking, reading, writing letters to his kids and actually listening at work meetings instead of scrolling. Who DOES this stuff? It’s the 21st century! But it’s what he’s gotta do to get Adela back. Oh, and he still wants to be Partner At The Firm. Can Carlos have it all? NO SPOILERS!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Didn’t Netflix address this topic in a documentary? The Social Dilemma ? Well, take that and cross it with The Breakup or The First Wives Club or something.

Performance Worth Watching: This is pretty flimsy material for Vega, so here’s a reminder to go rewatch Talk to Her or Sex and Lucia .

Memorable Dialogue: Carlos talks to the lady-voice assistance/search bot on his phone:

Carlos: How can I get my wife back?

Phone: I’m sorry Carlos, I can’t help you with that.

Carlos: You’re not so intelligent after all.

Sex and Skin: None! That’s part of the problem here, Carlos !!

Our Take: The centerpiece of I Can’t Live Without You finds Carlos trying to uphold two ruses simultaneously, dashing between a quality-time family dinner and a video call that’s pivotal to his being named Partner At The Firm. It aims to be a bit of madcap plate spinning, but it’s just tiresome and silly, an overlong sequence that drives home a gratingly obvious message about work-life balance – a missive that’s slopped into a thematic trough that also asserts how tech addiction feeds capitalistic ambition. Carlos chases material, and therefore spiritually empty, rewards; he neglects his family; he’s also a compulsive scroller who drops everything to go spend too much money on the fanciest, brand-newest phone on the market. This, the movie asserts, is bad.

I can hear you now: Tell me something I don’t know. The movie might get more traction if it didn’t seem so thematically simplistic, or was more committed to crafting comedy that doesn’t seem so hopelessly beholden to cliches. If director Santiago Requejo aims for satire, he misses. If he aims for poignant commentary on modern life, well, he misses that too. I Can’t Live Without You is the story of a somewhat likable screwup who takes 90-odd minutes of movie time to reframe his life outside of dead battery/recharge metaphors, and it’s ultimately too breezy and bland in writing and performance to leave much of an impression.

Our Call: You can live without it. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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