David O'ConnellWe Need to Talk About Kevin
November 22nd 2011 05:28
From its chillingly abstract opening half hour to its more mundane dissection of an unnatural, antagonistic mother and child relationship, Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) retains a power to disturb in the way it neatly interweaves the evolvement of evil against the backdrop of normality it seeks to poison.
The film opens elliptically like the placement of puzzle pieces – from different strands of time – artfully arranged into a mosaic of raw emotional extremes. Though jumbled, overlapping and chaotic, a series of disturbing impressions emerge. From the haunted, detached stares of Eva (Tilda Swinton) we see a woman and mother grasping for sanity amid turmoil that is portentously hinted at but never fully disclosed. The most distressing revelations are reserved for the final segment of the film when the psychological war between Eva and her son Kevin (Ezra Miller) culminates with a truly noxious and personal statement from the boy to his mother.
Though I’m not a fan of her earlier work (in fact, 2002’s Morvern Callar is a film I hated with a passion), I wholeheartedly acknowledge that Ramsay’s direction here is stunning. Idiosyncratic and impressionistic, her approach often bears a strong whiff of Nicolas Roeg about it. The way she manipulates time, colour, and perception is masterful in the way of Don't Look Now (1973) for example, providing a structural narrative power that only refracted cognitive stirrings as subjective as these can provide.
As ever the incomparable Swinton’s stark, non-classical looks provide the basis for a flawless, relentlessly magnified portrayal of deep-rooted emotional truth. She has few peers in modern cinema with her Eva standing alongside other recent, equally compelling characterisations in Young Adam (2003), Julia (2008), and I Am Love (2009). In the key role of the Kevin as a teenager, Miller, who has grown impressively into his frame since City Island (2009), is also impressive, though perhaps fractionally too one-dimensional.
The film is not without flaws. John C. Reilly is miscast, though not detrimentally, as Eva’s blissfully ignorant husband, whilst the credibility of Kevin’s rendering is infinitesimally offset when unnecessarily allowing the boy’s behaviour to become more overt. Two scenes immediately come to mind here: his ludicrous devouring of a chicken just after his mother tentatively offers to take him out for dinner, and the abnormally intense scrutiny of Kevin devouring a lychee immediately following a scene in which he's caused the loss of his young sister’s eye.
A very different experience from Lionel Shriver’s source novel (which is told via lengthy letters written by Eva), Ramsay’s film is a strikingly different but equally brilliant work in which the switch of medium has rendered the ability to faithfully translate prose utterly negligible. Though the director’s stylistic approach will alienate some (with the unsubtle sprinkling of the colour red as an all too defining motif perhaps seen as further overkill), We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the films of the year, a startling vision of maternal pain that will leave you reeling but desperate to experience the perverse brilliance of it all over again.
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