Review: The Life Before Her Eyes

Vadim Perelman (“House of Sand and Fog”) directs Emil Stern’s adaptation of Laura Kasischke’s 2002 novel. One lovely April day, two high schoolers in the girls’ bathroom face a classmate on a shooting spree. Flashbacks and flashforwards interpolate the girls’ lives leading up to that awful day when the shooter asks the best friends which one he should kill, and the fifteenth anniversary memorial service that only one can attend. The title is a literal description of the narrative premise. A poet who teaches at the University of Michigan—her current courses are Advanced Narrations and Poetry Writing Workshop—Kasischke’s prose overflows with allusion. On her first page she describes the pages of an English lit anthology as so thin, “they’re like dead girls’ dreams, translucent skin.” An epigraph by Apollinaire cites “my youth, dead with the spring.” Although the film’s visual design translates the novel’s evanescent hyper-sensitivities with lyrical focusing, close-ups and slow-motion, there are less subtle notes: the Zombies song “She’s Not There” on the film’s soundtrack is a tip-off. (“I wish I’d thought of it,” emailed Kasischke.) One girl is Maureen (Susan Sarandon’s daughter Eva Amurri from “The Banger Sisters” and “Saved.”) The other is the 17-year-old Diana, played by Evan Rachel Wood (“Thirteen,” “Down In The Valley”), and played by Uma Thurman (“My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” “Gattaca”) as an adult with a prof husband, a troubling 8-year-old daughter, a perfect flower garden and post-traumatic hallucinations. Portions of this psychological mystery transpire inside a left temporal lobe where a bullet comes to rest, but at heart it’s an original tale of unlikely pals: sorta slutty Diana teases Maureen the Christian about the Rapture. 90m. (Bill Stamets)