cinemattraction

The Life Before Her Eyes epitomizes what’s meant by the term overdirected. Vadim Perelman follows up House of Sand and Fog – his powerfully character-driven debut – with a movie torpedoed by its propensity for a new directorial flourish in just about every frame. It’s filled with montages featuring such irrelevancies as a close-up of a bee pollinating a flower, a longer take of pollen floating leisurely through the air, flocks of birds moving in precise unison, and Evan Rachel Wood diving into a swimming pool, over and over again.

Any attempts at effective dramatization fall to the wayside, beneath the self-consciously pretty aesthetic. It certainly dwarfs the development of Diana, the main character played by Wood in her teens and Uma Thurman as an adult. In the Wood scenes, she’s a rebellious young woman who divides her time between best friend Maureen (Eva Amurri) and an older boyfriend. As an adult, she’s a wife and mother left in a stricken stasis by her memories of a past trauma. The source of her woes is made clear at the beginning: a shooting at her high school that left many dead, which she thought she could have prevented.

In the right hands, a transcendent experience can be had at a film so loaded with quasi-experimental visual interludes. Just look at the work of Terrence Malick or Julian Schnabel. However, those directors understand the precise art of balancing their visceral digressions with the needs of the narrative, and they’re able to do so in a way that allows the extra imagery to comment on the lives being depicted. Here, it feels like Perelman’s showing off.

It’s possible, however, that he felt the need to compensate for Emil Stern’s lackluster screenplay. In adapting Laura Kasischke’s novel, he finds nothing worth saying about the human experience and the moral choice at the film’s center feels forced and gimmicky rather than organically derived. The actors are reigned in by the unfortunate conceit, the cutting between the stories proves exceedingly awkward and the mystifying final twist renders most of what’s come before it completely meaningless. For a more meaningful treatment of the tragically timely subject of a school shooting, stick with Gus Van Sant’s Elephant or the recent Dark Matter.

© 2008 Robert Levin. All rights reserved.

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