The Life Before Her Eyes

Review

In a vile-movie competition between Michael Haneke’s Funny Games and Vadim Perelman’s The Life Before Her Eyes, Haneke’s film would win�but only because he’s working so much harder to be noxious. Perelman, who also directed the punishing House of Sand and Fog, clearly regards himself as a life-affirming humanist: He lingers over bodies of bullet-ridden high-school students to drive home the idea that opening fire on random teenagers is a bad thing. Trapped by a sociopathic student along with her best friend (Eva Amurri) in a school bathroom, spunky 17-year-old Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) is forced to make a terrible choice�whereupon we cut to the anniversary of the tragedy fifteen years later, when the older Diana (Uma Thurman) is an art-history professor and the overprotective mother of a radiant little girl. Perelman moves back and forth between the younger Diana (whom he rather fetishizes) and the increasingly disoriented older one, with breaks for high-resolution shots of flowers, bees, etc., as well as that school-bathroom confrontation, which functions in the narrative like a striptease. If you haven’t caught on to the gimmick after ten minutes, the Zombies’ �She’s Not There� is all over the soundtrack. In between snorting and rolling your eyes, you can pass the time pitying Thurman, who has to emote in a vacuum, and admiring Wood�who is open and unaffected, the anti�Ellen Page. — David Edelstein