The Life Before Her Eyes
Directed by Vadim Perelman
Damn if the title The Life Before Her Eyes doesn’t give away director Vadim Perelman’s entire conceit! Evan Rachel Wood as Diana finds herself trapped in a Columbine-style high school massacre, confronting her classmate-gunman in the girls’ lavatory. The movie comprises memories and fantasies that flash through her mind’s eye. Anyone who still cares must tolerate Perelman cutting back and forth between Diana’s sexually active teen years featuring Woods’ cloudy-eyed sensuality. Then, improbably, you’d have to endure her imagined/dreaded future as a shell-shocked Uma Thurman, married to a father-figure professor and mother to a precocious little girl who gives back familiar bratty sass.
This gimmick depends upon some slight confusion about which “reality” is real, but it’s the dumbest metaphysical plot concoction since Demi Moore’s Passion of Mind (where one woman’s two psyches competed with each other in different time zones and different countries but with no concept of the absurd). The problem with The Life Before Her Eyes is director Perelman’s passion of mind. His previous film was the slightly less complicated but grotesquely, laughably serious House of Sand and Fog where the tensions surrounding a property battle between a snobby Iranian immigrant and a lazy San Francisco chick collapsed into a sinkhole of post-9/11 xenophobia and American fecklessness.
Perelman is one of those filmmakers with a shameless hankering for Art. It causes him to be suckered by bad contemporary fiction. Those navel-gazing contrivances about middle-brow consciousness and literary form are usually suburban-set stories of frustrated class rebellion like The Ice Storm, Affliction, In the Bedroom, Running with Scissors, Little Children and The Life Before Her Eyes, from a novel by Laura Kasischke. It’s all high-toned garbage. Diana’s story is meant to show the pressures on female sexuality. She grows up on the poor side of a small town; and despite risking a reputation as the school slut, her best friend is the churchgoing Maureen (Eva Amurri) who is fatefully stuck in that lavatory with her. But weighing down a girl’s life choices with the horror of a psychopath’s rampage proves maudlin, if not ludicrous. Nothing’s revealed other than Perelman’s shallow sense of what’s deep.
But at least Perelman is a more skillful pseud than book-of-the-month-club director Todd Field, whose middle-brow adaptations (In the Bedroom, Little Children) combine literary pretense with sexual distaste and a former actor’s sentimentality. Perelman’s idea of cinema is to juggle several states of consciousness at once (a Resnais knockoff). Yet it’s clear from the way Perelman films Wood, Thurman and Amurri—so that they all seem physically present and weighted with experience—that he is entranced by female dilemma. (Perelman also directed Kelly Clarkson’s Because of You music video.) That lavatory moment where Diana anticipates disaster has a remarkable time-stopped quality rising solely from the dread and expectation in Wood’s eyes.
Despite having poor taste, Perelman does show sensual (filmic) instinct. Cinematographer Pawel Edelman keeps the movie vibrant, layering unusual compositions with close-ups of flowers, bugs, bones, fruit and decomposing birds, all in clear detail—even dust sparkles in sunlight. It’s a live-action Joseph Cornell box memorializing a dead girl’s sexual-emotional life. Striking, but ugh.
Directed by Vadim Perelman
Damn if the title The Life Before Her Eyes doesn’t give away director Vadim Perelman’s entire conceit! Evan Rachel Wood as Diana finds herself trapped in a Columbine-style high school massacre, confronting her classmate-gunman in the girls’ lavatory. The movie comprises memories and fantasies that flash through her mind’s eye. Anyone who still cares must tolerate Perelman cutting back and forth between Diana’s sexually active teen years featuring Woods’ cloudy-eyed sensuality. Then, improbably, you’d have to endure her imagined/dreaded future as a shell-shocked Uma Thurman, married to a father-figure professor and mother to a precocious little girl who gives back familiar bratty sass.
This gimmick depends upon some slight confusion about which “reality” is real, but it’s the dumbest metaphysical plot concoction since Demi Moore’s Passion of Mind (where one woman’s two psyches competed with each other in different time zones and different countries but with no concept of the absurd). The problem with The Life Before Her Eyes is director Perelman’s passion of mind. His previous film was the slightly less complicated but grotesquely, laughably serious House of Sand and Fog where the tensions surrounding a property battle between a snobby Iranian immigrant and a lazy San Francisco chick collapsed into a sinkhole of post-9/11 xenophobia and American fecklessness.
Perelman is one of those filmmakers with a shameless hankering for Art. It causes him to be suckered by bad contemporary fiction. Those navel-gazing contrivances about middle-brow consciousness and literary form are usually suburban-set stories of frustrated class rebellion like The Ice Storm, Affliction, In the Bedroom, Running with Scissors, Little Children and The Life Before Her Eyes, from a novel by Laura Kasischke. It’s all high-toned garbage. Diana’s story is meant to show the pressures on female sexuality. She grows up on the poor side of a small town; and despite risking a reputation as the school slut, her best friend is the churchgoing Maureen (Eva Amurri) who is fatefully stuck in that lavatory with her. But weighing down a girl’s life choices with the horror of a psychopath’s rampage proves maudlin, if not ludicrous. Nothing’s revealed other than Perelman’s shallow sense of what’s deep.
But at least Perelman is a more skillful pseud than book-of-the-month-club director Todd Field, whose middle-brow adaptations (In the Bedroom, Little Children) combine literary pretense with sexual distaste and a former actor’s sentimentality. Perelman’s idea of cinema is to juggle several states of consciousness at once (a Resnais knockoff). Yet it’s clear from the way Perelman films Wood, Thurman and Amurri—so that they all seem physically present and weighted with experience—that he is entranced by female dilemma. (Perelman also directed Kelly Clarkson’s Because of You music video.) That lavatory moment where Diana anticipates disaster has a remarkable time-stopped quality rising solely from the dread and expectation in Wood’s eyes.
Despite having poor taste, Perelman does show sensual (filmic) instinct. Cinematographer Pawel Edelman keeps the movie vibrant, layering unusual compositions with close-ups of flowers, bugs, bones, fruit and decomposing birds, all in clear detail—even dust sparkles in sunlight. It’s a live-action Joseph Cornell box memorializing a dead girl’s sexual-emotional life. Striking, but ugh.
