GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 4/14/08)

Director Vadim Perelman's second directorial feature, following 2003's House of Sand and Fog, is a similarly funsy romp. By which I mean, in case you didn't see House of Sand and Fog, this is all-caps serious stuff. But while House remained (somewhat precariously) balanced on the knife-edge that can turn tragedy into bathos, this picture doesn't fare nearly as well, and begins weighing down the viewer with its putative significance only minutes after its opening credits.

Based on a novel by Laura Kasischke, Life features Evan Rachel Wood and Uma Thurman playing the same character, named Diana, fifteen years apart. Both give very fine performances, as does Eva Amurri (who's looking more and more like her mother Susan Sarandon all the time), playing Maureen, the teen best friend of young Diana. Diana and Maureen are a classic odd match — Maureen's a good girl (but not stuck up about it), while Diana's a bit of a hellion; smoking in the girl's room, kicking pervy dudes in the nuts, giving her virginity to a scruffy older guy who keeps a caged cougar in his apartment, that sort of thing. At the beginning of the picture the two are trapped in the girl's room of their high school, face to face with the puling twit who's just shot up their class with an automatic weapon. He tells them that he's going to kill only one of them.

We then cut to Thurman; her Diana's now a wife, a mother and an art history teacher in the same Connecticut town. And of course she is tormented by memories. And guilt. And surrounded by very vibrant imagery. Sometimes there's lightning. Sometimes she sees things. Something is wrong, and that's besides just what she's feeling.

As affecting as Wood and Amurri make the movie's central relationship, the movie itself is overstated and overwrought. Partially this is a function of the story, which — this might constitute a spoiler, so be warned — is basically Sophie's Choice meets An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge meets Columbine. But it's also Perelman's direction-with-a-capital-D, which never settles for a simple establishing shot of Thurman standing at a stove when he can throw a view of a sauté pan filled with juicy-reddish ground beef in there. The sheer insistence with which every image is offered up makes me feel like some jerk was sitting next to me, pulling on my sleeve. I've read that Mr. Perelman is in line to helm the Angelina Jolie-starring adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. That's almost too perfect.

— Glenn Kenny