The Life Before Her Eyes is a lush and beautiful film based on the novel by Laura Kasischke. Kasischke, a writer known for her ability to make prose read like poetry, is ably interpreted by director Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog) who translates her material with soft lighting, supple colors, gentle water motifs and languid pacing. However, the attractive The Life Before Her Eyes is an exercise in indulgent misdirection and manipulative dread, a film of such laborious tedium and style over substance that it will, in order: beguile, bore, confuse and ultimately infuriate.
Evan Rachel Wood and Uma Thurman are adolescent and adult versions of the same woman, Diana, who, as a high school student, was fiercely intelligent and softhearted, but hid those supposedly weaker attributes beneath rebellious bluster, illicit drug use and promiscuous sex. Maureen (Eva Amurri) sees through her best friend’s seditious smokescreens. Conservative and devoutly religious, Maureen loves Diana unconditionally, but fears that she’s in way over her head. Diana sees youth as something one must simply endure on the way to adulthood where, she is sure, everything will begin to make perfect sense.
Adolescent Diana doesn’t seem to be that far off. On the outside, the adult Diana has the picture-perfect life. She still lives in the small, quaint New England town in which she was raised, teaches art history, is married to the perfect husband and is the mother of a gifted but turbulently independent daughter who is shockingly reminiscent of her mother.
But on the inside, the adult Diana remains emotionally disemboweled by a senseless act of violence that changed her young life forever. Fifteen-years earlier, a gunman at her high school went on a killing spree. Cornering the mismatched best friends, he decreed that one would live and the other would die. But which one? As the anniversary of the traumatic event approaches, Diana must face anew the still gaping wounds of an experience she has never come to terms with, while somehow maintaining her tenuous grasp on reality.
The Life Before Her Eyes tells its story through a series of interlocked time-shifting pieces, playing Diana’s youthful impetuousness against the compromising reality of her middle age. Flashing back and forth but rarely seeming to move the plot forward, the shifts become melodramatic and pretentious, illuminating the difference between the three-dimensionality of Wood’s free-spirited, vibrant Diana and the one-dimensionality of Thurman’s brittle, uninspired portrayal. That the flashbacks and flash forwards are crucial to the plot becomes obvious by the end of the film, but by then we feel so betrayed by the cheap and silly Shyamalan-esque twist that we no longer care.
That the twist offers nothing in the way of commentary but exists only to astonish is indicative of the film entire. The Life Before Her Eyes contributes nothing new to the post-Columbine school shooting debate or the agony of survivor’s guilt. The film is rich in symbolism but absent of the things to which the symbols are meant to point. The Life Before Her Eyes is a paper-thin movie wrapped around what should have been a substantial and searing debate.
If The Life Before Her Eyes has a message, it is that life is too short to squander on foolhardy meaninglessness. Take the film’s advice. Stay away.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.