Friday, January 21, 2022

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

UK / USA, 112 minutes
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Writers: Lynne Ramsay, Rory Stewart Kinnear, Lionel Shriver
Photography: Seamus McGarvey
Music: Jonny Greenwood
Editor: Joe Bini
Cast: Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell, Ashley Gerasimovich, Alex Manette

I haven't yet read the 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver that serves as the basis for this movie, but I'm tempted to lay off some of the topical conveniences of the story on it, most notably the red-hot theme of random massacres in US public schools. For me, even just the switch from guns to bow-and-arrows kind of misses the topical point, which is that no one has conducted their mass murder exercise yet without guns and lots of them, at least as far as I can tell. For these reasons and other points of somewhat heavy-handed artifice, We Need to Talk About Kevin is probably best taken as a horror or thriller movie, where it offers a damned good ride. It's one of those movies where everything is constantly getting worse, the people we like most are flawed and thus can't catch a break, and for our part we can't look away. The salty popcorn never tasted so delicious.

Like the most skillful genre work, We Need to Talk About Kevin relies on using things well that we already know well: the Problem Child, the Safe Suburban Home, the Oblivious Dad, the Cold Mother. We can't help having a lot of sympathy for Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton), a working travel journalist who finds herself pregnant by an affable dude, Franklin (John C. Reilly). She marries him and has the kid, Kevin, who is almost immediately a difficult child. Altogether it suits director and cowriter Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here, Morvern Callar), whose work is often a meditation on violence, and never mind the ludicrous.


In essence, We Need to Talk About Kevin boils down to one intense relationship and/or fantasy power struggle between a mother and her son, an intensity that ultimately destroys everything. Like the legends of Nancy Spungen and Courtney Love, Kevin comes crawling out of the womb bad—hateful, scheming, relentless. There is some suggestion that Eva is cold because Kevin makes her career harder to maintain. Then she is removed from her favored urban environment into a sterile suburb she cannot adapt to. In this movie, a lawn sprinkler in the sound design often heralds disaster.

The movie constantly jumps across different points in time but maintains a remarkable unity of tone. Ratcheting tension is the unifying element and it is constant. There are many scenes from Kevin's childhood, where two actors together effectively put over the horror of Kevin, one circa 6 to 8 years old (Jasper Newell) and the other adolescent Kevin, 15 to 17 years old (Ezra Miller). There are scenes from after Kevin's crime, when Eva is living alone and working in a strip mall travel agency and suffers amazing indignities. There are scenes with a late-arriving daughter, Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich), ultimately some of the most devastating in the whole picture. And there are scenes from the night of the mass murder, including a brilliant setup for Eva and her dawning realization that Kevin is not one of the victims, but the perpetrator.

Still, given that all of these elements are so familiar, a stew ripped from the headlines and out of the pages of horror novels and self-help manuals, Ramsay is remarkably good at defying the potential for stale. The dread in We Need to Talk About Kevin comes by the pound. But a lot of that is accomplished by going so quickly to the further edges of extreme. Before we know anything about Eva or her life or circumstances except a few images we see her punched in the face by another woman and called vile names. We see her car and house vandalized, splashed with red paint.

And because it's Tilda Swinton we feel about every inch of the pain. Not everyone can play a haggard uptight yuppie the way she can and as usual she is bringing everything to the role. We feel Eva's flaws—her privilege, her hypocrisies, her own cruelty—as keenly as we feel the way she is trapped in her situation. She's not a great mother in many ways but no one deserves this. These results are so extreme, they are like a bad joke on some level. No one deserves the degradations Eva's life is thrown into in the aftermath of Kevin's crime.

But these extremes are also the point, in a way, about our own levels of desensitization. I found myself coolly comparing the mass murder scenes, the way they are handled, between this movie and Elephant (from 2003 like Shriver's novel). The killing is entirely offstage in We Need to Talk About Kevin and we see only glimpses of corpses. Then the scenes outside the high school on the night of the crime, with the worried parents thronging the grounds hysterical with apprehension, reminded me of scenes from the climax of John Schlesinger's 1975 Day of the Locust. There the desensitization was proceeding from living vicariously through celebrity, but a kind of celebrity is enacted by Kevin too, of course—the notoriety of the celebrity killer, apparently his dream.

I still need to see Ratcatcher and some of her shorts, but I would say We Need to Talk About Kevin is my favorite movie by Lynne Ramsay so far. Some of it strains credulity but the reasons for that are often ultimately even more provocative.

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