We Need to Talk About Kevin
Angelika Film Center, March 03, 2012
Movie #11 for 2012
Mothers and sons, eh?
TILDA SWINTON (I am Love, Orlando; pictured) was a big draw card for me to see a film based on a book I wasn’t interested in reading. I’d happily watch her drying dishes for two hours and call it art. I was also interested to see how successful the adaptation of the book was. Adaptations, especially of capital-l Literary fiction, are often difficult beasts. It’s tough to capture the ‘it’ that made the book so beloved or, even, interesting. Writer/director LYNNE RAMSAY (Morvern Callar) does her best with material she is clearly very much taken with, but - at least for someone who hasn’t read the book - there is so very much missing in the film.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is kind of an art-house version of The Good Son. Kevin (EZRA MILLER, City Island) is a difficult child who grows into a cruel teen who bolts the doors on his school gym and kills lots of his class-mates. It’s no spoiler to tell you that here, the film does not leave you in suspense.
The film starts well, with unconventional framing, dutch angles, a creepy soundtrack, and a chopped up narrative creating discomfort and confusion. The cream is Swinton’s inscrutable performance. But Ramsey’s cinematic tricks either get less clever or more familiar across the running time and their impact is greatly lessened by about the one-third mark.
Because of the progress of the film - telling snippets of the now, the then and the earlier-than-that - the climatic, horrifying event in the gym is neither shocking nor better understood. Ramsay seems aware that that any attempt to explain Kevin’s act is inadequate, so avoids explanation. This, interestingly, also turns out to be inadequate.
Thank goodness, then, that there is Swinton and a surprisingly effecting coda to keep me from seeing only the gaps in the adaptation.
