Tagline: Taglines: Your life can change in an instant. That instant can last forever.
Based on the best-selling novel by Laura Kasischke, The Life Before Her Eyes is a dramatic thriller about Diana (Oscar-nominee Uma Thurman), a suburban wife and mother who begins to question her seemingly perfect life –and perhaps her sanity– on the 15th anniversary of a tragic high school shooting that took the life of her best friend.
At seventeen, spirited and rebellious young Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) looks forward to grabbing hold of her future. Fueled by curiosity and desire, she is all appetite, constantly challenging her more reserved best friend Maureen (Eva Amurri) to take risks. The two tease each other about the roles they play-Diana describes them as “the virgin and the whore.”
Their lives are interrupted forever when the most normal of spring days is transformed by a senseless act of violence: a fellow student opens fire in their school and confronts Diana and Maureen and forces them to make an impossible flashpoint decision…
Fifteen years later, an older, more settled Diana (Uma Thurman) looks back on that day from the vantage point of a survivor. On the surface, her adult life is picture perfect. She is married to a popular professor and is raising an eight-year-old daughter who is sensitive and creative, even if she has inherited some of her mother’s rebellious streak. The coming of spring to her hometown is achingly beautiful, yet as the season change leads towards the fifteenth anniversary of the school shooting, Diana experiences increasingly disturbing undertones of distress.
When she thinks she sees a former teacher on the street-a man she knows was killed in the massacre-she nearly has a car accident. Her little girl redoubles Diana’s anxiety with a bad habit of running away and hiding at school. Diana may be troubled by guilt, or she may be affected by something more primal, more insidious. Her well-established life no longer seems quite real…
Meanwhile, we track young Diana’s trajectory leading up to the encounter with the gunman. Seen up close and personal, her rebellious attitude is revealed as less confident and far more troubled than she lets on. To sustain the dream of a future, Diana at seventeen finds herself running away from the consequences of the present…
When the adult Diana sees her husband apparently betraying her with a younger woman, Diana finds the fabric of her whole life tearing apart-there is nothing she can hold onto any longer. Caught up in this vortex, her panic escalates as her daughter goes missing. It is as if Diana has lost herself… her life disappearing before her eyes.
The film builds to an inexorable revelation that Diana is not the survivor she appears to be. Her life as she saw it was only the dream of a future-a mournful flash forward in the last moments young Diana has on earth.
The Life Before Her Eyes is a 2007 American thriller film directed by Vadim Perelman. The screenplay was adapted by Emil Stern from the Laura Kasischke novel of the same name. The film stars Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood. It was released on April 18, 2008, and revolves around a survivor’s guilt from a Columbine-like event that occurred 15 years previously, which causes her present-day idyllic life to fall apart.
About The Production
For director Vadim Perelman, the film of The Life Before Her Eyes began with reading Laura Kasischke’s novel. Having made his powerfully dramatic and visually rich feature film debut with the Oscar-nominated House of Sand and Fog, starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connolly, Perelman found that her book inspired his instincts for literary material that provokes visual exploration: “The whole novel is like a song about these girls. It has a real element of magic to it. Laura is a poet and this was one of her very first works of prose.”
In her New York Times review, critic Erika Krouse emphasized the visual impact of author Laura Kasischke’s writing: “The Life Before Her Eyes evokes terror and redemption, shadows and light. Kasischke treads a delicate line with the precision and confidence of a tightrope walker. She reminds us to look hard at life, to notice its beauty and cruelty, even as it flashes before us and disappears.”
Yet her compressed and allusive style also posed a challenge for film adaptation. Perelman says of the book: “It doesn’t have a very linear structure or a conventional narrative… it has a very dreamlike quality to it. But that’s what made it so attractive to me: the challenge of bringing that to screen.” Laura Kasischke describes the central strategy of her novel: “It’s about dreams and about imagination-that splash of imaginative ecstasy or agony-and the tearing of the fabric of a dream.”
Rooted in the screenplay adaptation by Emil Stern, Perelman’s approach to the material was to express this sense of imminent magic and mystery, while still making sure the film was anchored in its own internal logic: “The movie as a whole is not a perfectly ordered experience with very clear causes and effects. Knowing that, I tried to echo that feeling on a scene-to-scene basis with little ellipses-for instance, Maureen is obsessed with a boy in her class and they talk about him all the time but you hardly see him.”
The audience is invited deep into the texture of how things happen. They learn very soon that Diana’s experience is a series of mirrored reflections, not a simple through-line. Tracking the eerie overtones that surround everyday events is a way to help draw them into her world – and to build suspense about the ways that world is being challenged.
Laura Kasischke’s inspiration for the book came from a connection she made between the tragic shootings at Columbine and a car accident in her small Midwestern town that claimed the life of three high school girls. “Everyone kept saying of those who died that `they had their whole lives ahead of them’ – all the potential that would never be realized, all the experiences that they would never have.”
She investigated her own sense of the overlap between dreams and memories: “Sometimes I have memories that seem less real for me than a dream I had last night. And sometimes I wake up from a dream which seems as though something has really happened to me. Was that less a lived piece of my life than some vague memories I have from the past?” Given that the central theme of the book has to do with “imagined life,” witnessing interplay of dream and memory further developed by seeing a film of her book being made is particularly powerful for the writer, “It’s fascinating to see people pretending to be characters that I pictured in my mind. It’s a strange sort of projection of my inner life out on the streets – and onto the screen.”
Continue Reading and View the Theatrical Trailer
The Life Before Her Eyes (2008)
Directed by: Vadim Perelman
Starring: Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood, Eva Amurri, Brett Cullen, Gabrielle Brennan, Lynn Cohen, Nathalie Paulding, Molly Price, Oliver Solomon, Anna Moore, Isabel Keating
Screenplay by: Emil Stern
Production Design by: Maia Javan
Cinematography by: Pawel Edelman
Film Editing by: David Baxter, David Baxter
Costume Design by: Hala Bahmet
Set Decoration by: Carol Silverman
Music by: James Horner
MPAA Rating: R for violent and disturbing content, language and brief drug use.
Distributed by: Magnolia Pictures
Release Date: April 18, 2008
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