The Life Before Her Eyes

Plot synopsis:
Imaginative, impetuous, and wild Diana McFee (Evan Rachel Wood) cannot wait for her adult life to begin. While awaiting the final days of high school in the lush springtime, Diana tests her limits with sex and drugs as her more conservative friend Maureen (Eva Amurri) watches with concern. Then the two teens are involved in a Columbine-like shooting incident at their school and are forced to make an impossible choice.
The film mostly focuses on Diana’s adulthood (Uma Thurman). She leads an apparently normal life as an art history university professor. She has a daughter, Emma (Gabrielle Brennan), and she’s married to the professor who once gave a speech in her school about the power of visualization, how one can shape one’s own future in this way. We learn, however, that she feels guilty about something that doesn’t let her sleep.
One day she gets a call from Emma’s school. The nuns who run the school complains about her behavior. Later, at an ice cream parlor, Diana asks Emma not to hide any more as she is always doing. “You hate me,” Emma replies to her mother's reproaches. They leave the parlor abruptly and as they’re about to get into the car, Diana sees her husband, the professor, with another woman. She hesitates about confronting him and instead remains in the middle of the street where she is hit by a pickup truck. On her way to the hospital she imagines that blood is escaping from her body. However in fact she hasn’t been hurt by the accident. What is happening is that she is remembering the complications she had following an abortion in her high school days.
The day of the 15th anniversary of the shooting, a memorial is held at the school. Diana drives in front of the school several times until she finally decides to stop and bring in some flowers. As she enters the school she’s asked whether she’s one of the survivors. She smiles and walks inside, first leaving flowers on some desks and then moving on to the rest rooms where one of the shootings took place. At that moment she gets a call from Emma’s school; Emma is missing. Diana is told that a pink piece of clothing has been found in the woods. She drives there and walks through the woods, shouting out her daughter's name. Emma appears before Diana’s eyes for a moment but then vanishes almost as soon as she has appeared.
Back to the rest rooms in the school where Diana left the flowers. This is the place where she and Maureen were forced to decide which of them should survive. Maureen had offered herself first, but the shooter, Michael Patrick (John Magaro), asks Diana why it should not be her; she agrees and asks to be killed. Diana is then shot and dies, followed by Michael, who offs himself. All that we’ve seen earlier in the film is what Diana had dreamed her adult life would be like if she let Maureen die. Emma is the girl she never had, the girl that she aborted. As the film ends Diana is asked once again if she is a survivor and she replies "No" with a smile, with a sense of relief that she did the right thing by dying and having her friend live her life.

Tags: tragedy, philosophical, murder, sadist, flashback

Review:
In the high school time-line, Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) hangs out with best friend Maureen (Eva Amurri), alternately discussing future plans and current boyfriends.
One of the main reasons for picking this up is the star pairing of Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood playing the same character Diana in a tale that explores how lives get changed and affected in a post Columbine styled school shooting.
Directed by Vadim Perelman who also helmed The House of Sand and Fog, The Life Before Her Eyes is adapted from the novel by Laura Kasischke, and the first scene sets up the hook beautifully - what if you're caught in a dead end with your best friend, and a gunman?The narrative unfolds in non-linear fashion, which splits the story into two separate threads, one with the younger teenage Diana (Rachel Evan Wood) and her BFF Maureen (Eva Amurri) discussing the usual problems, issues and dreams a teenager would have, and their aspirations in life, and the other putting its focus on the adult Diana (Uma Thurman) now married to a professor and having to raise her child Emma (Gabrielle Brennan) who's quite a handful to handle, providing some mean reminiscence into her own past that she hopes she's able to steer her kid out from that doomed past.In character pieces like this, both lead actresses shine in their respective spheres, with Evan Rachel Wood playing yet again an impetuous youth living life her own way, never hesitating to dabble in sex and drugs, and basically the making all the mistakes that one can make as a teen.
Which you can partake in if you put yourself in similar shoes, with a gun pointed at you and a chance to live, or die, per your wishes.Uma Thurman tackles her mom role with aplomb, juggling raising a kid with trying to avoid her past which is slowly coming back through flashbacks no thanks to the 15th anniversary of the fateful day in school.
Thurman brings to the table that level of maturity, as well as a sense of paranoia as she tries hard to forget her past.Vadim Perelman created a film that's basically very dreamlike in quality as it deals with themes such as conscience and self-preservation, and crafted the key bathroom scene with ingenuity that keeps you constantly guessing how it will all play out, and pulling his punches at the right time to keep up that level of suspense right up to the end.
Production values are purposefully split down the middle to differentiate the landscapes between the two time periods to reflect the lifestyle and mood of Diana and of course to throw clues in addition to what's being done by the narrative, with a haunting soundtrack throughout courtesy of James Horner.Some may not like the how the finale played out but I thought it was refreshingly different from the usual narrative twist attempts.
Perelman beautifully tackles numerous themes such as friendship, post-traumatic stress, motherhood and abortion among others.The cast features three powerful performances: by Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood and Eva Amurri.
Then there's the bathroom scene which could have easily gone wrong had it been played by lesser actresses but this is one of the most powerful scenes in a movie of recent time and one only has to watch it to understand its impact.'The Life Before Her Eyes' is not an easy film to follow and those who are looking for something simple or light may feel let down but on the other hand it's a very strong movie.
In many films, flashbacks can yank us around and cut tension, but here Evan Rachel Wood is so good that the two characters are seamlessly interwoven in a way that we are treated to a complex character study of a grown woman who is driving herself mad with regret and anxiety and guilt.
The cinematography is excellent as it charts the deep feelings between 2 best girlfriends, and the mystical internal turmoil over time and memory, now and then, real and illusion.My only problem is that I know this subject intimately - I reviewed the book Copycat Effect: http://hammernews.com/copycateffect.htm , which proves that almost any publicity about these mass shootings causes kids and adults to reenact them, usually on anniversaries of previous events.
Well, I don't usually muster up the energy to post reviews on IMDb, but frankly, after seeing all of the glowing reviews on here, I felt compelled to get the word out, as I'm sure there are people who share my point of view on this film.I really don't mean to come across as unnecessarily harsh or critical, but this was probably the worst film I've seen in the past year.
Add on a number of overly-convenient plot points (let's have the character turn on the radio just as an expository news report is broadcast), a LOT of contrived pathos, an exploitation of columbine, and the most absurd and atrocious ending which makes the film go from bad to immeasurably worse...
and you have "Life Before Her Eyes." And note - I enjoyed House of Sand and Fog.I'll finish this up by saying that Evan Rachel Wood's performance, in spite of the horrible dialog she had to work with, was pretty good, all things considered.
Too bad the overdone flashback-flash forward technique used didn't match up well with the disjointed story or the fine quality technical elements, and as a result the film was very nice to look at artistically, but a failure at what it attempted to tell us, which admittedly is a difficult way to make a film work out the best way in the end, IMO.
The chances of success in this type of storytelling are heavily outweighed by the chances of failure, and this one failed me.The Columbine-like story elements were dramatically staged and very effective for what happened later, as they seemed to set the stage for the traumatized but dreamlike later life of one of the students involved in the massacre, a loose and easy but beautiful girl named Dianna, who along with her best friend were the last students to be confronted by the shooter.The story had to be seen all the way to the very end to get it fully, and I won't spoil it for those not seeing it yet, but the answer the adult Dianna gave to the question asked her by a helper as she arrived to attend the 15 year memorial of the school shootings nearly gave away the story's end, as it then became clear what really happened 15 years earlier in this filmmaker's story of mixed fantasy and reality.(The graveyard scene near the end, and what the young Dianna saw on the marker there also gave a clue of what might have happened in the shooting and what was to be revealed later.)I had to ask my wife what Dianna was asked by the helper, as the entire soundtrack was garbled and only about half was intelligible, a real problem in arty and modern "veritas" movies like this one that often seem to try too hard to be "realistic" and thus leaves the listener/viewer with serious dialogue confusion as a result, to me a basic film-making element that must be done right for overall success.With the still very attractive Uma Thurman as the mature Dianna, and the Hollywood-beautiful-blond-type Evan Rachel Wood as the teenage Dianna, it was as much a feast for the male eye as the story was to females.
This film is about an intertwining story of a teenage girl involved in a college massacre, and her life 15 years later.When I watched "The Life Before Her Eyes", I did not enjoy it.
I don't want my comments about the directors decisions to take away from Evan Rachel Wood and Uma Thurman's performances, they were both great and deserving of a much better and emotional final scene.
Anyways, don't bother if you don't want to waste time watching a rather confusing film that tries to make you work out what's happening and then make you think that the answer is coming towards the end of it, only to abruptly end with nothing answered at all.
In this film, as the anniversary of a tragic school shooting that killed Diane's (Uma Thurman)best friend approaches, she is forced to confront and deal with a not so perfect past.
Im a very picky independent film fan and have loved and thought about this movie for days after every time I've watched it.
When it gets there, it is a bit puzzling but once you realise what the film was climaxing to - it is a bit of a cheat (though luckily nothing as horrible as Perfect Stranger's ending).Thurman gives the performance to watch here and Evan Rachel Wood is equally as good.
Now, if someone can't see the differences between "The Sixth Sense," "Elephant," and "The Life Before Her Eyes," maybe that person should watch more movies before writing.
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).
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.
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.
(Perelman directed the moving, tragic "House of Sand and Fog," released in 2003, which we raved about at the time.) "Before Her Eyes," like last year's Sandra Bullock vehicle "Premonition," is what I call a women's film--which is decidedly not the same thing as a chick flick.
Rachel Evan Wood plays "Diana," one of the two girls--a restless, sexually active, alienated, self-willed and somewhat confused young woman, whose friend Maureen (Eva Amurri) presents a counterweight to those qualities.Uma Thurman plays Wood's character as a grown-up--an art history teacher with a husband, a child, and traumatic memories of the day that changed everything.
But the movie actually starts and ends within about the same 3 or 4 minutes of time, while Diana is in high school.Other key characters are Eva Amurri (Susan Sarandon's daughter) as Diana's best friend in high school, Maureen.
The movie flashes to this scene several times and since we see the adult Diana 15 years later we must figure that her friend had been shot.
The life before her eyes, as the title suggest is the depiction of ones life flashing through in a millisecond but the way it was projected in this film is so dramatic and thoughtful that one cant seem to forget about this movies even after watching it more than one time.This is the story of friendship, parenting, relationships, everything what life is all about and all these elements are placed in this film so well and interconnected that the viewers are indulged in the characters."The strongest muscle in the body is the heart" physically but heart at the same time is the weakest muscle of all if seen emotionally and this film present this bitter reality of life, dramatically if not emotionally, to the viewers excellently.Directed by Vadim Perelman (his second film) known for exceptionally superb "The house of Sand & Fog", though not very strong as the later, this shows the talent, perception and a vision this man has.
From the cast the best performance comes from Evan Rachel Wood who plays the main role and believe me this girl has a lot of talent to become a superstar actor in the near future.Back ground music was very typical with this kind of movies, but with the concept, the drama & the intrigue this movie has, you tend to forget about that.Thats all and I would definitely recommend this movie to all looking for a serious, dramatic & emotional treat.
I hesitated to watch, because I'm honestly not a fan of Uma Thurman at all—but I do think Evan Rachel Wood is a pretty impressive actress, and I'd never heard anything about this movie, so I thought I'd give it a look at the start, with plans on probably switching over to another show when it started—but I never switched to the other show.
But I digress from my main reason for coming and posting on this site.Granted, I was tired when I happened upon this and was halfway working at the start of the movie so I wasn't fully focused (at least not at first, but I did quickly become more focused as the movie went on), but I did not think the title nor certain of the music others have cited was a dead give-away to what was actually happening, nor was I making sense of some of the connections (for instance, the adult Diana saying "no" when asked if she was a survivor at the memorial that I saw one reviewer referenced—and after reading it, I thought "Oh yeah, okay!")so when we actually finally got the full footage of the key bathroom scene, I was taken completely by surprise.I watched through the whole movie fully believing I was watching one thing, which I should note I thought was a pretty good story as I thought it was being told—hence the earlier comment about Uma Thurman, I thought she appeared to be very believable as a PTSD victim and I enjoyed what I thought was a study of the human psyche following such a traumatic event--even if some things didn't seem to make sense, only to find it was something completely different.
It seemed well-paced throughout, and although I sometimes found the Uma Thurman parts seeming a little long and wishing we'd get back to the younger girls and the "critical scene," I realized after the fact that it was probably just perfect as it was.All in all, this is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time—and it definitely kept me thinking about it for a long time afterward, something few movies do.
A movie directed by Vadim Perelman and starring Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood and Eva Amurri was indeed about to surprise and envelop me in a way I have not savored in quite some time.This will not be an easy review to write as I almost want others to go into it with the same blindness and blank slate which I possessed.
You will realize those reasons after watching it yourself.As the film begins, we quickly recognize that Uma Thurman's character, Diana, is a 30-something married woman living the would-be storybook life as a mother and an Art History Teacher in the town where she grew up.
The "life before her eyes" becomes nothing once she understands the implications of that option.The film is all about point of view, everything is being seen from Diana's POV except for the rest room scene which is from the audience point of view; where the actress Wood is communicating nonverbally with viewers in about the best acting sequence you are likely to ever witness.
(It also explains why the Zombies' "She's Not There" seems to be playing every time someone turns on a radio).Uma Thurman portrays Diana as she is today, while Evan Rachel Ward plays her as a restless teen, and both are excellent, as is Eva Amurri as her best friend in school.
'The Life Before Her Eyes' (if you ask me they should have just stuck by 'In Bloom') tells the story about Diane, a victim in a high school shooting who suffers from an extreme case of survivor guilt; the audience witnesses the story in flashes cutting from a young Diane (Evan Rachel Wood) to an adult one(Uma Thurman).
Yet, some scenes later, adult Diane begins to act very much like the person she wanted to avoid at all costs to become.One of the aspects that amazed me most about this film is how I didn't doubt for one second that Wood and Thurman were the same character.
It was nominated for three Academy Awards, including best lead actor for Ben Kingsley.The Life Before her Eyes stars Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood playing the same character of Diana.
In this case the older Diana played by Uma Thurman is that life that flashes before the eyes of the younger Diana played by Evan Rachel Wood in the midst of a high school shooting just before being shot.
All in all, "The Life Before Her Eyes" is a film that satisfies, entertains and gives a surprising outcome, and I'm thinking about reading the book to know the original story-- and that's something I rarely feel like doing, so you may understand why I consider it so special..
I couldn't tell if the older Diana was seeing things and making it up in her mind, or if she was replaying her life as if she had been the one shot instead of her friend, or maybe if she was dead the whole time and it only lets you onto that fact at the end or something else I completely missed.I still have no clue what went on in the last 30 minutes of this movie.