The Life Before Her Eyes

This is a shame because, aside from a jarring twist at the end that goes tragically over-the-top in convoluting the film's entire plot, The Life Before Her Eyes is a beautifully-photographed and very well-acted cinematic offering. Despite being a dialogue-based drama, it manages to be a constantly involving movie... that is, until everything gets so poorly turned on its head at the end; you'll go from feeling engrossed to heavily disoriented and cheated in a matter of seconds during the film's final frames.

The Life Before Her Eyes deals with the emotional consequences of a Columbine-like high school shooting incident. In my opinion, no film that has dealt with this subject matter has ever trumped the unforgettably astounding Elephant, which is nothing short of a perfect work of art. It is also one of my all-time favorite films, and that's probably something I'm alone in because a lot of people probably find Gus Van Sant's uncompromisingly realistic approach to be monotonous, and while I respect those who hold that opinion, I couldn't disagree more; Elephant is beyond enthralling. What's interesting is that I bet most people would find The Life Before Her Eyes to be a more entertaining film than Elephant because the former isn't as slow-moving and its plot elements are far more similar to what we're used to seeing in movies. In fact, both films play with the chronology of events, showing us certain things out of order or from different characters' perspectives, but the difference is that the undeniably inferior The Life Before Her Eyes plays an insultingly disappointing fast one on the audience at the end, while Elephant never strays from the relentless realism that makes it a masterpiece.

As I mentioned, The Life Before Her Eyes does feature really good cinematography. Driven by an ostensible interest in scientific details, the filmmakers are particularly interested in sublime, ethereal shots of flora, and they also give us a number of scenes involving a science class in which the teacher talks about how the heart is the strongest muscle in the body (a tidbit that becomes crucial in several later moments in the film) and how the body is 75% water (and images of water are a predominant motif throughout the movie, right until the end). It's interesting to note how there are even some visual similarities between this film and Elephant. In both films, the shooter discovers the girls inside the school bathroom; in both cases, this is a wise choice by the filmmakers because of the feeling of confinement you can get here and can't quite get in other school areas, such as spacious cafeterias, long hallways, or large classrooms with windows. Another visual similarity that I really can't help but wonder if the makers of The Life Before Her Eyes took directly from Elephant is that of the shots that focus solely on a light blue sky with perfectly white clouds; these shots in The Life Before Her Eyes are unmistakably similar to those in Elephant, but the latter film is so much more cinematically-savvy in terms of the precise moments in which it chooses to place those shots throughout its running length.

Evan Rachel Wood's performance as the young Diana is note-perfect. That's not to say that Uma Thurman doesn't do well as the protagonist's older version, because she certainly does, but the material she has to work with simply isn't as meaty as what Wood is given. It's evident in this movie that Wood is better than the large majority of young actors and actresses who have attempted to carry out effective emotional depictions of a teenager's tough transition from adolescence to adulthood. In fact, her performance here serves as a great follow-up to the work she did in Thirteen, a film in which she did a stellar job depicting a child's toilsome entry into the teenage years. She does a particularly remarkable job in a scene during The Life Before Her Eyes that alludes to the teacher's comment about the heart being the strongest muscle in the body... despondently certain that this isn't the case with her own heart, young Diana breaks down, and there's not a second in this moment that we don't believe the authenticity of the pain that suddenly overcomes her. The only thing is, though, that aside from the horrible decision to have the twist ending it has, one other flaw of the film is that young Diana's story is certainly much better crafted and emotionally-involving than what we get from the main character's older version, not because there's anything wrong with Thurman's acting, but because the story is weaker. One suspects that the film may have been a triumph if it had focused solely on young Diana's experiences and on the often painful path she treads in hopes of becoming a woman.

By severely objecting to the film's twist at the end, I'm not suggesting that I dislike the film because I disagree with its views on the concepts of life and death (or of the possibility of elements that can blur the line between the two). My agreeing or disagreeing with that would not influence whether or not I think the movie is good because I don't think it's fair to make a judgment like that simply because you disagree with the filmmakers' viewpoint (I agree that war is a bad thing, and that the ongoing war in Iraq is a mistake, but I disliked The Kingdom, In The Valley of Elah, and Stop-Loss because all three films had different, yet equally flawed approaches to the subject matter). What DOES influence how I feel about The Life Before Her Eyes is how the twist is brought about in a way that it feels like you've been hit on the head with a hammer. All of a sudden, you find yourself in a disoriented state as the film's final minutes elapse with the obligatory shots of things that we have already seen being presented to us in a condescendingly explanatory way, perhaps so that we stand in awe at the craftiness that the filmmakers believe they possess. If this were a campy film, such a turn of events might be acceptable, but the fact that such a sublime and emotionally-affecting film can warp itself so abruptly in its denouement is simply not forgivable. Watching The Life Before Her Eyes is like observing a beautiful artistic image suddenly get blotched or ripped, thus becoming irreversibly tainted.

5/10