We Need to Talk About Kevin (8/10)

December 17th, 2011

Uncorrected personality traits that seem whimsical in a child may prove to be ugly in a fully grown adult. – Robyn Hitchcock.

It’s often been said, mostly by me, that you can’t blame kids for the way they are. Parents who spoil their children or worse, parents who set a bad example to impressionable kids are generally to blame. This may or may not be true, though, in the case of Kevin, who was born bad, grew up worse, and ended up killing half his classmates.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is not the first parents-of-a-killer-child movie of 2011, although it’s considerably better than its predecessor, Beautiful Boy, despite covering similar ground. The main reason for its superiority is in its telling and its surprising complexity. Director Lynne Ramsey has shown considerable trust in her handling of a story that appears obvious, but is in fact anything but.

In the annals of movie history you’ll do well to find another kid like Kevin. I was half expecting Lee Grant and William Holden to turn up and claim there’d been a mix-up at the hospital. Damien, I mean Kevin, didn’t like his mother Eva (Tilda Swinton) from pretty much the moment he popped out of the womb. As an infant he screamed in her presence, but coddled up to his father (John C. Reilly), who couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. As a toddler he refused to say her name, as a young boy he refused toilet training, and as a teen he...well, let’s just say the pranks got more serious.

We Need to Talk About Kevin has two timelines: pre- and post-slaughter. I originally preferred the latter. Kevin’s clearly a bad lot, and the numerous examples tell the same story over and over again. You could spend your time discussing how Kevin managed to get as far as seventeen without getting the shit kicked out of him on a twice-weekly basis, or you could wonder why Eva, the mother, wasn’t more proactive in getting professional help for what was clearly a disturbed child, but the scenes become repetitive and, one is led to believe, superfluous. Kevin has a younger sister. She has a glass eye. Kevin ominously munches a juicy lychee.

Equal billing time is given to Eva and her life as the mother of a high-school slaughterer. Again, Beautiful Boy discussed this aspect, Michael Sheen and Maria Bello having to hide from journalists and questioning their parental skills, all the time trying to get back some semblance of a life. Here, Ramsay concentrates solely on the human angle. Eva is hated in her community. Her house is daubed in blood-red paint; she’s randomly assaulted on the street and, to make matters worse, the Jehovah’s Witnesses come calling. She’s pretty sure she knows where she’s going to be spending the Afterlife, thank you very much.

I am a bloody idiot.

This review you’re now reading is actually my second draft for the movie. In the first, I criticised the movie for its pre-slaughter depiction of Kevin, suggesting that it was a bit heavy-handed and unequivocal. Having not read Lionel Shriver’s book of which this movie is a faithful reproduction (so faithful, in fact, that the author cried with happiness when she saw it), I was unaware that these scenes may not have happened in precisely the way Eva remembers. Post-apocalypse Eva is far too busy questioning her mothering abilities to be able to discern truth from foggy recollections and, like all mothers, blames herself completely. Kevin is a horror. Eva tries, but perhaps not hard enough, to raise him correctly. Her husband simply doesn’t see just how difficult it is to raise such a kid. If the memories we see are accurate, no mother could have prevented the abhorrence that was to follow. The actual truth, though, might have been different. Maybe Eva’s husband, who turns a blind eye in every pre-bloodbath recollection, might not have been as ignorant as was made out. Maybe Eva forgot – or chose to forget – the truth. Maybe Eva’s lashing out.

And I didn’t twig this the first time I watched the film. Ever since this website began I’ve been bleating on about the need for more intelligent movies; here is one and I didn’t recognise it. I’m mentioning this to you now so that you won’t make the same mistake and slam the movie for its scarcely believable depiction of the titular brat.

Swinton is excellent here across the board, which should come as no surprise to anyone, and Ramsay (who has waited an awfully long time to bring another movie to our screens, following 1999s Ratcatcher and 2002s Morvern Callar) shows considerable adroitness in weaving the two timelines together. They’re perhaps let down a little, though, by a lack of momentum in the film’s start-to-finish, but in the grand scheme of things this is a minor quibble. Eva was, I believe, too hard on herself. Her depiction of Kevin couldn’t have been more demonic were he to have a cloven hoof and a pointy tail. I guess we’ll never really know what the true story was, or who to apportion blame towards, but the father’s blind eye (sadly, not the only such eye in the family) may hold the key.