Reel “Life” mirrors real death in “The Life Before Her Eyes.”
In the wake of the Virginia Tech and Columbine mass murders, it’s hard to turn our eyes away from the devastating legacy of such trauma on the young people caught in the crossfire at schools.
But do we really want to go there?
A drama exploiting that subject doesn’t exactly make for cheery viewing on a lovely spring night out at the multiplex. But today’s sometimes puzzlingfemale coming-of-age piece has sufficiently good performances and enough narrative suspense that at least it might make for a diverting evening at home — in a few months, when the movie comes out on DVD.
Otherwise, only the masochistic may want to pay bigger bucks to check out the reliable Uma Thurman and teenage angst prodigy Evan Rachel Wood sharing the role of the perennially melancholy Diana, 15 years apart in time. For screenwriter Emil Stern’s adaptation of the book “The Life Before Her Eyes” by Laura Kasischke, a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards pivot around a central event, when one of young Diana’s fellow high school students goes on a shooting rampage and sets his gun sights on her and her best friend Maureen (played by Eva Amurri).
The story toggles back and forth around the Big Scene, which plays as a voyeuristic kind of a “Sophie’s Choice” moment, as directed with uncomfortable intensity by Vadim Perelman. But despite that engaging key sequence, Perelman’s latest work shares a similarly sluggish pace and downbeat tone with his earnest previous film, “The House of Sand and Fog.”
Though both Thurman and Wood make for potent presences on the silver screen, even together they can’t overcome a script twist that must have delivered better in the original book form. As the story references adolescent rebellion, abortion, maternal frustration, religion and interpersonal morality, it does so through a trick framework revealed in a confusing climax. While this secret ending makes the proceedings unpredictable, a rare thing among Hollywood’s cookie-cutter plots, it also betrays our assumptions about the protagonist in a way that ultimately undermines our sympathies for her.
‘The Life Before Her Eyes’
Two Stars
Starring: Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood, Eva Amurri
Director: Vadim Perelman
Rated R for violent and disturbing content, language and brief drug use
Running time: 90 mins.
