Vadim Perelman has the Lifetime Channel TiVo'd 24 hours a day, especially while he went to film school. That can be the only explanation as to why he seems to make nothing but garishly ornate melodramatic weep stories. His most famous film, House of Sand & Fog, kept a handle on the waterworks until its preposterous and forced conclusion. His newest film, The Life Before Her Eyes, is not quite so lucky.
The film's storyline follows two eras of the same woman, jumping back and forth between teenager Diana (Evan Rachel Wood), and her adult counterpart (Uma Thurman), suffering survivors' guilt after surviving a school shooting where she was directly faced with death and forced to make a choice (whether she or her friend should die). In a sort of questionable career choice, she works in a school just down the street from the school where she was faced with the horrible event, the exact place that gives her all the bad memories that trigger all the flashbacks that we have to sit through. The narrative is cyclical, jumping back and forth between the time before the shooting, depicting Diana's unlikely friendship with an innocent church girl, and her affair with an older man, and her current life, where she is a bit emotionally estranged from her husband due to the troubling memories, taking care of her young child.
Most noticeably, the film is hideously over-directed. Perelman imbues every transition and a lot of extended sequences with this precious ornamental quality that makes the emphasis meaningless, giving as much emotional weight to a tulip as he affords to a murdered teenager. I will give credit where credit is due, the shot of one student lying dead in the gym with beams of light is a striking shot, but, drawing comparisons to 300, most of the film is seemingly shot that way, which makes the freshness turn sour quite quickly. He needs someone to tell him, "No", and make sure he only uses his visual flair when it's more necessary. If you put ketchup on everything, invariably you're going to get sick of it, especially because ketchup doesn't go on everything.
The other major problem for the film is that its weepiness is so restrained that it makes a film a curiously empty experience. Something overwrought qualities could have turned it into camp (not the director's preferred choice of enjoyment, but enjoyment all the same), but much of the film's runtime is spent in mundane purportedly "meaningful" or ironic discussions of pre- and post-shooting life, or tiresome, continuous flashbacks to the exact same moment (The Moment, if you will), and there's not really enough variation or meaning in the sequence to require its appearance so frequently.
The film culminates with an idiotic twist in its final reels, one that, including being stupefying, is also presented in a way that is both baffling and infuriating, as it negates everything that comes before it. That in itself doesn't necessitate failure (there's a certain film, one of the best of this decade, that did exactly this, and made even less sense; if you've seen it, you know what it is ), but the way it is presented here, especially after having to sit through so much blathering nonsense, makes it feel like an extra helping of cheapness thanks to the fact that it negates much of the story. The Usual Suspects utilized this sort of twist after giving us a captivating and exciting crime tale, then dropping the bomb. The Life Before Her Eyes gives us slice of life minutiae, then tells us none of it happened. Why did what sounds to be a poignant examination of grief and life need a 'twist' anyway? Did The Sweet Hereafter need a twist ending? I think not. The way it comes off when it happens, it smacks of desperation and intellectual exhaustion, turning this supposed character study into a bizarre anti-abortion screed that it doesn't fit in. There's a reason you haven't heard of this movie, folks, and I watch 'em so you know when you're at Blockbuster or browsing Netflix, you can skip right past The Life Before Her Eyes.
You're welcome.
{Grade: 4/10 (C-) / #48 (of 66) of 2008}
The film's storyline follows two eras of the same woman, jumping back and forth between teenager Diana (Evan Rachel Wood), and her adult counterpart (Uma Thurman), suffering survivors' guilt after surviving a school shooting where she was directly faced with death and forced to make a choice (whether she or her friend should die). In a sort of questionable career choice, she works in a school just down the street from the school where she was faced with the horrible event, the exact place that gives her all the bad memories that trigger all the flashbacks that we have to sit through. The narrative is cyclical, jumping back and forth between the time before the shooting, depicting Diana's unlikely friendship with an innocent church girl, and her affair with an older man, and her current life, where she is a bit emotionally estranged from her husband due to the troubling memories, taking care of her young child.
Most noticeably, the film is hideously over-directed. Perelman imbues every transition and a lot of extended sequences with this precious ornamental quality that makes the emphasis meaningless, giving as much emotional weight to a tulip as he affords to a murdered teenager. I will give credit where credit is due, the shot of one student lying dead in the gym with beams of light is a striking shot, but, drawing comparisons to 300, most of the film is seemingly shot that way, which makes the freshness turn sour quite quickly. He needs someone to tell him, "No", and make sure he only uses his visual flair when it's more necessary. If you put ketchup on everything, invariably you're going to get sick of it, especially because ketchup doesn't go on everything.
The other major problem for the film is that its weepiness is so restrained that it makes a film a curiously empty experience. Something overwrought qualities could have turned it into camp (not the director's preferred choice of enjoyment, but enjoyment all the same), but much of the film's runtime is spent in mundane purportedly "meaningful" or ironic discussions of pre- and post-shooting life, or tiresome, continuous flashbacks to the exact same moment (The Moment, if you will), and there's not really enough variation or meaning in the sequence to require its appearance so frequently.
The film culminates with an idiotic twist in its final reels, one that, including being stupefying, is also presented in a way that is both baffling and infuriating, as it negates everything that comes before it. That in itself doesn't necessitate failure (there's a certain film, one of the best of this decade, that did exactly this, and made even less sense; if you've seen it, you know what it is ), but the way it is presented here, especially after having to sit through so much blathering nonsense, makes it feel like an extra helping of cheapness thanks to the fact that it negates much of the story. The Usual Suspects utilized this sort of twist after giving us a captivating and exciting crime tale, then dropping the bomb. The Life Before Her Eyes gives us slice of life minutiae, then tells us none of it happened. Why did what sounds to be a poignant examination of grief and life need a 'twist' anyway? Did The Sweet Hereafter need a twist ending? I think not. The way it comes off when it happens, it smacks of desperation and intellectual exhaustion, turning this supposed character study into a bizarre anti-abortion screed that it doesn't fit in. There's a reason you haven't heard of this movie, folks, and I watch 'em so you know when you're at Blockbuster or browsing Netflix, you can skip right past The Life Before Her Eyes.
You're welcome.
{Grade: 4/10 (C-) / #48 (of 66) of 2008}