The strife before our eyes

By Steven Zeitchik

Vadim Perelman's "House of Sand and Fog" was one of the most artful, if at times self-conscious, depictions of loss and tragedy to come out of a major studio in a long time. But it looks like a Monty Python skit compared to the director's new effort, "The Life Before Her Eyes," a suburban-family drama, parallel-universe mystery, class allegory, sexual coming-of-age tale and school-shooting tragedy.

You know, that genre.

The movie, which opens next week, centers on a high-school student (Evan Rachel Wood, excellent in her well-honed modes of playfulness and precociousness), who survived a school shooting but watched her friend get killed in front of her. Wood then grows up to be, well, Uma Thurman, wracked with guilt over surviving the Columbine-esque massacre but living a perfect little suburban life.

Or does she?

The central mystery is whether Wood's character actually survives and is living the Thurman sections, or if she's inventing the whole thing in her head the seconds before the shooting. The movie melds ambitions with an almost reckless insistence: an auteurish vision (lots of stylized shots with spinning cameras aimed at the sky and close-up water lapping at the lens), an indie drama's sense of loss and contemplation and the sci-fi-ish conceit in which half the movie may or may not be taking place. Not since "The Lake House" has such an extravagant Twilight Zone hook been married to such a familiar genre. (As a movie that was first called "In Bloom," it may also may be the first example of a film that reverted to the title of its source material upon release, and as such the first film we can think of that gives out the big reveal in its name).

But "Life" is more than just a symbol of a kind of stylized filmmaking that we don't see as much as we used to; it's representative of the cold climate for indie drama, even the more ambitious kind. The 2929 production failed to land a satisfactory deal when it played Toronto last year and so is now going in-house through Magnolia, a perfectly good home for it -- assuming Wagner et al. didn't pay a very un-Magnolia price to make it.

Perelman's career is in a trickier place. He's the kind of guy who would've flourished in the indie drama-happy '90's. Now he's caught between the prestige world and the indie one, and though he's decidely more capable than your typical Sundance director -- check out this insightful interview with him on Box Office Mojo -- his movie still feel a little too distant and not quite grand enough for the current Oscar zeitgeist. (His next project is an adaptation of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged." You see what we mean.)

Perelman showed some self-awareness when he said at the premiere of his new pic earlier in the week that "it's a difficult film to get made and get out there and possibly even to watch." For the sake of a maturing director with no small amount of promise, let's hope America doesn't agree.

Comments

[John Fit!]

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