STUDIO: Magnolia
RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2008
STARRING: Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood, and Eva Amurri
WRITTEN BY: Emil Stern
DIRECTED BY: Vadim Perelman
GENRE: Drama
RATING: R

Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog) is an interesting director, and Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood, and Eva Amurri are all actresses of a pretty high pedigree. It makes it all the more fascinating that their collaboration, The Life Before Her Eyes, is so visually stunning and thematically compelling, and yet never quite comes together. Can all the blame be laid at the feet of debut writer Emil Stern? Is Life Before Her Eyes further proof that no matter what gorgeous images and accomplished performances you put in a film, the narrative foundation must be strong enough to support it? The cinematography is gorgeous, the direction is accomplished, and yet, Life Before Eyes feels hollow at its center, like a painting with a stunning frame but not enough on the canvas.

Based on the book by Laura Kasischke, Life opens with a pair of high school friends Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maureen (Eva Amurri) stopping off for a freshening-up in the bathroom before their first class of the day. While they're talking, shots ring out from the other side of the door. At first, the girls are just confused, but, quickly, fear turns into a total nightmare when a classmate with a semi-automatic bursts through the door. We then move outside, where the cops and parents have already assembled, hear shots, and flash forward twenty years later to a grown Diana (Uma Thurman), dealing with survivor's guilt on the anniversary of the Columbine-esque event. From here, the movie weaves back and forth between Diana's teenage life and her life as a thirtysomething mother, teacher, and wife. How do events like the one Diane endured permanently scar a person? And, isn't it fascinating how the mistakes and personality quirks of our teenage selves recur through the rest of our lives?

Like the shooting itself, Perelman and masterful cinematographer Pawel Edelman (The Pianist, Ray) punctuate scenes of domesticity in Life Before Her Eyes with moments of unexpected fear. One of the film’s more effective scenes involves a grown Diana, eating dinner with her husband and daughter when the little one unexpectedly starts to choke on her food. It's one of a few moments in the movie that is impossible to turn away from and fits with the overall theme of the movie nicely - the struggle to shape your identity as a mother, teacher, lover, friend, etc. against the unpredictability of life and human behavior. A professor says "Begin to be NOW what you will be forever", and Kasischke's ideas about how much of our personality is not just starting but fully formed by the time we graduate from college is definitely an interesting one for a piece of fiction. How can you begin to be anything when tragedy, infidelity, and unpredictability lurks around every corner?

Interesting ideas, but perhaps more for fiction than for cinema. There's not enough dramatic urgency in the idea that a troublesome teenager will grow up to have a troublesome teenage child of her own or even the concept that some people try and atone for past mistakes through simple domesticity but end up making similar mistakes to the ones they made as teenagers. And, as if Stern knows that the screenplay is a little static and dull, the film becomes a "twist movie", which makes it feel more like a trick than the challenging drama it could have been. Perelman has even come out and said that he wishes people would know the twist going in because it would make the film more rewarding. Sounds like a cheat to me. If you wanted the twist to be known from the beginning, you could have re-written the screenplay and made a better film.

Wood, Amurri, and, particularly, the always-great Thurman make every right decision in The Life Before Her Eyes, but the movie still fades far-too-quickly from memory for a film with as serious a set-up as high school violence. It feels like another case where the talented crew and ensemble did everything they could to raise an incredibly flawed screenplay above its Lifetime TV Movie roots but ultimately could only take it so far.