Grown-up Diana (Uma Thurman) gets couch time with Paul (Brett Cullen).
Vadim Perelman, who debuted as a feature film director with the relentlessly grim, impeccably made House of Sand and Fog, now comes up with a suitably glum follow-up, The Life Before Her Eyes.
Taken from a slippery novel by poet Laura Kasischke, the movie is an equally quicksilver thing that plays fast and loose with the past and present, the real and imagined.
At its showy but hollow heart are the struggles of a 17-year-old girl dealing with sex, identity and young adulthood while her older, suburban mom self, still struggling, deals with her rebellious young daughter and her professor husband.
A deadly Colombine-style high school shooting massacre is the catalyst for much trauma, some real tension and a twisty climactic revelation that may blow the minds of some but merely frustrate and enrage others.
Young Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) and her friend Maureen (Eva Amurri)
The movie, which features Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood as the character's older and younger selves, appears to be more concerned with moody poetic imagery than with creating persuasive characters or gripping dramatic conflict.
Perelman and cinematographer Pawel Edelman (who has worked memorably with Roman Polanski) go heavy on the slow-mo, long camera pans and other technical tricks in their arsenal hoping to convey a not-of-this-world quality, equal parts small-town memory film and fever dream.
There's a lot of promise here, but the film is too damned ephemeral for its own good and not nearly as profound as it makes itself out to be.
Although the lovely, sad-eyed Wood and handsome, anxious Thurman do nice work, they don't deliver the breakthrough performances the movie cries for.
Not a terrible movie but not a terribly powerful one, either.
