2007, USA
Crime, Drama
The choice one makes in a horrific and stressful moment can reflect the life led before that point – it can also have irreparable damage on the life that occurs afterwards.
In The Life before Her Eyes, two best friends find themselves in front of the gun of a high school shooter. Reviving painfully fresh memories of the Columbine tragedy despite the nine years that have passed (almost to the day), the screams from the hallways and the terrified family members waiting outside are unnerving. The film, however, focuses on the viewpoint of the two girls -- friends who have been given a choice of who will live and who will die.
Director Vadim Perelman applies the same moody atmosphere as his first and last effort, House of Sand and Fog. In his sophomore film based on the novel by Laura Kasischke, Uma Thurman plays Diana, a distraught and distracted woman who is forced to relive the harrowing moment upon its fifteenth anniversary. Evan Rachel Wood represents her younger self, a teenager who constantly makes the wrong decisions as opposed to her admirable friend who thinks through her options (played by Susan Sarandon's daughter, Eva Amurri).
The Life before Her Eyes employs a visual stream of consciousness that jumps back and forth between the two periods on the whim of a word or the memory of a character. Sliding between eras that look identical in fashion and technology and connecting images that are at times eerily absurd, the secret that is whispered throughout the film is not tightly concealed. A telling song by The Zombies even finds its way into various scenes -- an incongruous choice if not for the song's transparent lyrics.
As the conscience and the heart battle for rights to Diana's every move, she becomes frazzled by the struggle. In her mind, life stopped at 17, and though she succeeded at obtaining the career of the teacher she quietly admired, the good guy husband and the beautiful daughter (granted, who is as obstinate as she was), she fails to escape the past that haunts her.
Perelman delivers a quiet contemplation that, though thinly veiled as truth, becomes an illustrated meditation. The future visualized by a teenager is rarely the life that is ultimately achieved, though the dreams of that age can bare a great weight on the actual outcome. The guilt from a moment that would otherwise be redeeming can shatter the dream realized, as all actions spin from one important decision. The Life before Her Eyes dreamily expands upon this moment and allows it to live a life of its own as past and present collide.