"The Life Before Her Eyes" Review

More abstract and colorful than his first picture, House of Sand and Fog, director Vadim Perelman takes Evan Rachel Wood (Across the Universe) and Uma Thurman sleepwalking in a somber piece called The Life Before Her Eyes.
Both actresses play Diana at different ages. As a youth, she stands with her best friend, Maureen (Eva Amurri), as they face a lone school gunman in the fictional Briar Hill, encapsulating Jonesboro, Paducah, Columbine, Virginia Tech and DeKalb as one thick, throbbing vein for cutting. The whole movie delivers a persistent sense of dread.
Using a back and forth technique with Diana as pivot point—Wood as student, Thurman as adult—the siege is graphically rendered and recalled. For the expanding numbers of random violence victims—at Lane Bryant, McDonald's or at church—this will either strike a nerve or serve as catharsis. The Life Before Her Eyes, finishing its bone-chilling prolog with unseen gunshots, is violent. Like Perelman's previous picture, which also contains too much symbolism, The Life Before Her Eyes connects, and not only because one wants to see adult Diana recover from past trauma. Wounded older Diana, thanks to Thurman's subtle performance (and she is at her best), is like an apparition.
It is as if something about the shooting totally destroyed her soul. Perelman, working from Laura Kasischke's novel and Emil Stern's screenplay, provides clues with the prelude to massacre, subsequently running a loop of girl chat, notes passed between desks, crushes—the stuff of adolescence, leading to a happy stroll before class, ending with an executioner. Amurri and Wood are too adult to pass for high school students and the timeline is distracting with the mind racing to reckon with the use of cellular phones, Oriental tattoos and girls calling one another "dude." But amid Christian fish symbols, topical references to the potential for life and bold images of flowers, birds and bees, those initial mystery gunshots ricochet throughout the slowly paced plot. They shatter on mirror images that reflect the past or project the future. Whether it works depends upon one's estimate of younger Diana. Wood's gangly youth and Thurman's live wire are missing some crucial metaphysical fact that has yet to be shown. When it is, and it is, plainly and without adornment, it's a mission accomplished. It's not as if Perelman doesn't hint, casting sunbeams around a pool of black-red blood and seeding The Life Before Her Eyes with its anti-life morality of altruism.
Disturbed older Diana is an art teacher with a rebellious daughter enrolled in a Catholic education and a husband who is distant. Hers is a suburban life that seems permanently poisoned by that day of atrocity. She finally breaks down in the bathroom. Thurman comes through.
Wood plays to type, another whim-worshipping waif who seduces a bad boy in the swimming pool. Her character is not entirely vacant—she's like a groupie with a bus ticket home in her back pocket—and her scenes with Amurri's Maureen add depth. The girls earn their bond. When it is threatened, tension rises.
The unresolved conflict—who will live, who will die—is the only way to arrive at The Life Before Her Eyes's tragic theme that life is fleeting, fate trumps choice and—as every other movie in the last 15 years insists—civilized man is doomed. Unlike, say, the eerie but empty The Sixth Sense; at least one does not feel cheated at the outcome.
Neither does one feel that the best has been lost, which is why the impact is muffled. When Diana and Maureen tremble at gunpoint, they represent the potential for life more than they represent life. In this regard, though realistic in depicting that sacrifice equals death, the intelligent The Life Before Her Eyes ends with blood on its hands.

THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES

U.S. Release Date: April 18, 2008

Distributor: Magnolia

Director: Vadim Perelman

Cast: Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood

Running Time: 1 hour and 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R (violent and disturbing content, language and brief drug use)

(Courtesy: Box Office Mojo)