I’m sure you’re all expecting a review of Hunger Games, and I’ll do my best to get around to it when I can. In point of fact, I had every intention of seeing it today. But then I remembered that seeing it on opening day was a terribly stupid idea for anyone who isn’t a teenaged girl and/or suicidal.
Fortunately, I was able to find another movie about homicidal teenagers. Not really the “District 12” variety, mind you, but more of the “Columbine” type.
When I first went in to see We Need to Talk About Kevin, I only knew that it starred Tilda Swinton in a much-lauded performance as the exasperated mother of a child who might be evil. So the film opens with a shot of a curtain blowing in the wind to sounds of a distant basketball game, followed by Tilda Swinton in a mosh pit full of red stuff, just before a shot of some girl with one eye eating her cereal and what the holy fuck am I watching?!
The first fifteen minutes of this movie feel like a nightmare, and it doesn’t help that Swinton is walking around as if she’s in a fugue state. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was going on at first. But then Swinton visits a prison, where she meets an incarcerated youth. The latter chews off his fingernails, putting them in a neat line on the table in front of him. And suddenly, it all clicked into place.
Swinton plays Eva Khatchadourian, mother of the eponymous Kevin. As you may have already guessed, that was Kevin she’s meeting in the prison. The meeting itself takes place two years after he committed some terrible crime that resulted in multiple casualties, put Kevin in prison, and made his mother a pariah with PTSD. The rest of the story is told in flashback, as Eva recalls Kevin’s upbringing. Hence the nightmares.
The critical thing to remember about Kevin is that we first meet him in prison. Though we may not know the circumstances, we know that he’s killed people. We know what he’s turning into. There is no ambiguity here. This is a very important thing to keep in mind when the parents and the pediatricians decide to look the other way.
Even when Kevin was a baby, he’d never stop screaming around his mother, though he’d miraculously act well-behaved around everyone else. This means that Eva knew her kid was a terror, though the boy’s father (Franklin, played by John C. Reilly) only saw a son fit to be spoiled and the doctors saw a kid of sound body and mind. This resulted in a great deal of disagreements, with Eva yielding because hey, maybe he’s just being a kid. With hindsight, it’s clearly obvious that even when Kevin was in diapers, he was already smarter than both of his parents put together. At such a young age, he’d already mastered the art of manipulating people, which was a skill he’d continue to refine through the rest of his life.
As time passes, it becomes clear that Kevin will purposefully act stupid, just to spite his mother. Still later, we see that even though he obviously knows the difference between right and wrong, he’ll knowingly do something wrong and evil, purely for his own enjoyment and because he can get away with it. Last but not least, it’s clear that Kevin has absolutely no regard for human life.
To sum up: Kevin is a true psychopath. He’s a monster whose continued existence can bring nothing but misery and death. So what does one do when such a kid decides to go postal?
Well, the first thing everyone does is to blame the media. Suddenly, everyone wants to know what movies he was watching, what games he was playing, what songs he was listening to, and so on. The movie, however, doesn’t show any of that. In fact, his room is disturbingly bare. No posters, no magazines, no DVDs, nothing. Yes, we do see grade-school Kevin play some violent video games with his dad (On a Nintendo 64, by the way. Nice attention to detail there, in regard to keeping the timeline straight.), though he doesn’t show much sign of being a gamer in his teens. I won’t spoil his most prominent hobby here, except to say that such a talent might be considered perfectly normal — maybe even extraordinary — if it was anyone else.
Peer pressure is another common scapegoat, but that’s highly unlikely in this case. We never see any of Kevin’s friends, or even any sign that he has friends at all. In point of fact, we never hear anything about his social life or his life at school. To me, this implies that Kevin’s classmates and teachers see him as a kid who just keeps out of everyone’s way but is otherwise a model student.
So then there’s the question of genetics. It’s very tempting to think that Kevin was born a monster, especially since there were signs at such a young age. But that argument starts to lose water when Kevin gets a younger sister (Celia, played by an adorable young Ashley Gerasimovich) who seems to be well-adjusted in every way. So unless the “psycho” gene is on the Y chromosome, DNA probably isn’t the answer.
The only option left at this point is to ask how the parents might have been responsible, which is definitely this movie’s bread and butter.
First of all, the film makes it absolutely clear that neither Eva nor Franklin were abusive in any way. They’re both quite financially secure by all appearances, and they do everything possible to provide a loving home. But their success in that regard is debatable. After all, I’ve already mentioned how Franklin likes to coddle his son, and Eva shows a frustrating lack of ability to communicate with Kevin.
Though to be fair to Eva, it’s clear that she’s putting in every possible effort, and it’s hard to blame her for lack of communication with a son who seems perfectly unwilling to talk with her. As for Franklin, of course he spoils his son. Why wouldn’t he, when Kevin only shows Franklin what he wants to see?
On the other hand, the film shows us firsthand that Eva and Franklin rushed into this decision. It could easily be argued that Eva was an incompetent mother and Franklin was a coddling father because neither of them were ready to be parents. Though that argument could be countered with the sight of Kevin putting his fingernails in a neat row on the prison table. So which came first, the bad parents or the bad seed?
Anyway, let’s get back to the framing device for this movie. In between the flashbacks, we see Eva go through her life as if she was one of the living dead. She moved to a much smaller and shabbier house, she quit her job to find much crappier work, and the rest of her family is nowhere to be seen, yet Eva still can’t escape the sins of her offspring. People are constantly staring in her direction, her house and car get vandalized, and some locals even go so far as to sucker-punch her in broad daylight. Yet Eva takes it all in stride because in her mind, she deserves it. She deserves all of that punishment and so much more.
Of course, that leads back to the question of whether or not she does. Yes, Eva may have inadvertently started the chain of events that led Kevin to his master crime, but it was a perfectly innocuous little act that was done with the best of intentions. Hell, it could only have been the catalyst with 20/20 hindsight. In fact, I imagine that anyone reading this who saw the movie might have no idea what I’m talking about, that’s how seemingly insubstantial it was.
Eva did everything she could to raise Kevin right, but there’s always the question of whether she could have done more, or if Kevin was always beyond saving at all. In a way, the latter possibility might be the more scary option. That she put so much of her heart and soul into raising this demon, only to find that it was all for nothing, is a terrifying thought. Her entire life was gutted right in front of her eyes by her own flesh and blood, and there wasn’t a thing that she could’ve done about it.
But nobody else sees that, especially not the parents of Kevin’s victims. All they see is a scapegoat. They see a crappy mother who could have and should have intervened before it was too late.
It’s easy to see why Tilda Swinton picked up so much awards buzz for her work here, and it’s a damn shame she lost the nomination to so many far less worthy candidates. This character is all about the internal conflict, and Swinton sells every moment of it. In her dead-eyed stare, the character’s massive amount of guilt and trauma is made plain to see. Brilliant work.
As for Kevin, he was played by no less than three actors — Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell, and Rock Duer — at various phases of the character’s development. All three resemble each other to an uncanny degree, and they all do a masterful job of playing a credible psychopath. Miller in particular plays a scary motherfucker, and I can’t wait to see his work in the future.
Props are also due to John C. Reilly. Granted, he does start the film with more of his same schlubby schtick, but there comes a time later in the movie when Franklin starts to come around. There’s a dawning realization in the back of this character’s head, and Reilly makes it fascinating to see the character retreat further and further into denial.
Finally, I’ve got to talk about the visuals. The camerawork and editing in this film are both beautiful, particularly in how they make the film so much more surreal and scary. I was especially fond of how this movie utilized color in such a striking manner, most notably in its use of red and blue. There’s also a “Jackson Pollock-style” splatter motif that I found very intriguing.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is the sort of film that one shouldn’t walk into unprepared. Everything about this film is exceptionally powerful, from the clever scripting to the tough subject matter to the memorable characters played by phenomenal actors. But most of all, this is a deep and disturbing look at a very real and important issue. It’s imperative to remember — tragic though it is — that someone like Kevin is out there right now.
This is a masterful film, guaranteed to stay with its audience long after the credits have rolled. Brace yourselves and seek this one out.