The Life Before Her Eyes

Death is one of the things that we fear most. This ever-present threat of breaking contact with life on Earth and with the people we know and love causes us to wear seatbelts and avoid dark alleys. Yet for some, like Diana in The Life Before Her Eyes, death seems preferable to a life haunted and tortured by the past.

Director Vadim Perelman has beautifully converted Laura Kasischke’s novel of the same name into a gripping film that grabs the viewers’ hearts and minds, holding them at attention for 90 minutes and only releasing them into a disturbed arrhythmia.

Evan Rachel Wood and Uma Thurman both deliver spectacular performances, doubling as the girl-turned-woman plagued by the memories of her live-fast-die-young adolescence and a school shootout for the history books.

Seventeen-year-old Diana is pregnant by her much older boyfriend, who trespasses to swim in a wealthy neighbor’s backyard pool and smokes a lot of pot.

However, she’s best friends with Maureen, an enthusiastic church-goer who dresses modestly and limits dates to frozen yogurt and wholesome drives around the block.

The movie’s conflict hinges on this unlikely combination and the feelings of guilt Diana has that she can’t live up to Maureen’s pristine and selfless standards.

After she fails to report the threats of a classmate, Diana must face the reality of what she discounted as a joke as the boy enacts a school shooting echoing Columbine.

Cornered in a bathroom by the troubled shooter and his automatic, Diana pleads with Michael Patrick, the mop-headed, angry, artillery-wielding teenager, not to kill her and Maureen.

The girls are left with an ultimatum. Holding hands and crying in the spray of water from bullet-bursted pipes, they make the tough decision in excruciating slow motion.

The Life Before Her Eyes reminds us how cyclical life is; it seamlessly weaves scenes from Diana’s teenage and adult lives into one.

Bloody images of the massacre at Hillview High cut to child-sized handprints in bright red finger-paint hanging on the refrigerator door in the home Diana shares with cheeky daughter Emma and handsome husband Paul.

Diana becomes the angry, reactive mother she always hated while raising a daughter in her spitting image and takes the role of every disrespected high school teacher she ever had.

This film hits the audience where it hurts; many viewers will leave the theater crying, and all will be chilled by the reminder that each of us has only one shot at life.

Perhaps, though, they can also leave in agreement with Diana’s class-skipping art student friend, Anna. Life’s too short not to have fun.