眼前的生活(2007)英文影评

眼前的生活英文名为：The Life Before Her Eyes

“The Life Before Her Eyes” plays an irritating game of narrative hide-and-seek, continually doubling back on itself to revisit the trauma from which all else evolves. Each peekaboo flashback reveals a teeny bit more of a life-and-death confrontation in a high school girls’ restroom between two best friends and a deranged teenage gunman during a Columbine-like massacre.

Those friends, Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maureen (Eva Amurri), are polar opposites. Diana, smoldering and rebellious, is the bad girl, and Maureen, proper and churchgoing, is the goody-goody. If the movie, directed by Vadim Perelman and adapted from a novel by Laura Kasischke (Emil Stern wrote the screenplay), doesn’t make this friendship entirely credible, that is partly because it keeps you hyperaware of its own meticulous structure and insistent leitmotifs: water, blooming flowers and thunder and lightning at every dramatic juncture.

A victim in the massacre, Mr. McCleod (Jack Gilpin), is a biology teacher who tells the class that the body is 72 percent water. Water is shown jetting out of a pipe in the girls’ restroom after the gunman randomly opens fire, and one of Ms. Wood’s love scenes with a scruffy boy from the wrong side of the tracks takes place in a swimming pool. References are made to Paul Gauguin, whose Tahitian painting “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” is the topic of discussion in an art class taught in the present by the grown-up Diana (Uma Thurman).

Late in the movie Diana’s husband, Paul (Brett Cullen), a philosophy professor, delivers a ponderous lecture on conscience. The film has already signaled in a hundred ways that Diana, 15 years after the massacre, still feels terribly guilty about it. The day before the shootings the killer had informed her of his intentions, but because she thought he was joking, she didn’t tell anyone. And in any case she shared his hatred of school.

Ms. Wood and Ms. Thurman make a reasonably well-matched version of the same blond, statuesque woman at 17 and 32. The troubled teenage rebel is a role Ms. Wood has played before, and she carries it off with her usual effortless grace. Looking into her eyes, you glimpse the desperate, reckless impatience of a girl in that precarious stage of development where the mind hasn’t caught up with the body, and the personality is still half-formed.

In the more thankless role of the adult Diana, Ms. Thurman walks around with the anxious scowl of someone hiding from herself. The mother of Emma (Gabrielle Brennan), an 8-year-old who has inherited her mischievous streak, Diana is afraid of everything. Emma has developed a habit of regularly running away from her Roman Catholic girls’ school; Diana is summoned and warned that her daughter’s behavior is unacceptable. Much of the story unfolds on the 15th anniversary of the massacre.

Tidy, predictable, excruciatingly fussy in its details and lacking the tiniest glimmer of humor, “The Life Before Her Eyes” contradicts the director’s claim in the production notes that the movie “is not a perfectly ordered experience with clear causes and effects.” As it plods along decorously, you have the sense of reading a poetic essay in which every image and metaphor is hammered too neatly in place.

It has the same morose, overly schematic style as Mr. Perelman’s 2003 filmmaking debut, “House of Sand and Fog.” That movie, an adaptation of a novel by Andre Dubus III, transcended its pretensions because it had a more compelling story and a gripping central performance by Ben Kingsley.

In “The Life Before Her Eyes” the confrontation between the girls and the killer culminates with his demand that they make an impossible choice. The outcome is withheld until the very end. If you haven’t figured out the ending from the carefully planted clues, it will leave you feeling sucker-punched.

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