Vadim Perelman's 2003 directorial debut, House
Of Sand And Fog, frequently read as an overreaching attempt to outdo Atom Egoyan
at his own dread-fueled, atmosphere-rich cinematic game. Similarly, Perelman's
follow-up, The Life Before Her Eyes, finds him clumsily trying to outdo M. Night
Shyamalan. His second film doesn't have the heartbreaking visual beauty of his
first, but once again, the dread is thick and the atmosphere is so heavy that
every simple car ride or bedtime story seems like it's happening on the
crumbling edge of a lonely cliff.
That's certainly what Perelman is going for, for
reasons that become clear in the final act, but the preceding 85 minutes of
setup maintain such a forcefully manipulative, portentous tone that the end is
more long-awaited relief than key puzzle piece. Like an episode of Lost, the film leaps back
and forth in time, finding nonstop meaningful parallels between two phases of a
woman's life. As a teenager (vividly played by Evan Rachel Wood, in one of the
film's few bright spots) Life's slightly wild protagonist is determined to
express herself personally and sexually, and to escape her boring small town.
At the same time, she's insecure and afraid of being judged, particularly by
her religious but deeply supportive best friend, Eva Amurri. Fifteen years
later, as a brittle adult played by Uma Thurman, she's still in the small town,
now with a husband and daughter, and her life revolves around the crippling
guilt stemming from a school shooting where she and Amurri faced the gunman
together.
Perelman and first-time screenwriter Emil Stern
(working from Laura Kasischke's novel) clearly hope their audience will be
panting for the big reveal as they dole out tiny slices of the past, saving the
key moment for last. But it's hard to maintain interest through the overbearing
foreshadowing, the pointlessly repeated footage, James Horner's exhaustingly
ominous soundtrack, and the worst use of a professorial lecture to explain a
film's psychological underpinnings since Jade. And then there are the
oh-so-pointed ways in which Wood's every casual word and deed carries
significant ironic weight in her future. Every moment is critically meaningful, Life
says, in its facile, simple-minded way. But if that's true, why does it waste
so much of its run time on overwrought symbolic music-video footage of dead
birds and wilting flowers? Like Wood, viewers may someday regret every
squandered moment of their lives, and this film is full of them.