We Need to Talk About Kevin: 2011 AFI Fest

Word on the street was that this film flopped. I was more than excited to see it, until I was warned not to. Something fantastic about the rush lines at film festivals is that you meet a plethora of fellow movie fans. They’ll make that hour long wait fly by but also fill your head with their own movie reviews and opinions. See this! Don’t see this! This is awesome! This sucks. I got the “this sucks” line many times for We Need to Talk About Kevin. Something in my gut told me…decide for yourself. And I’m glad I did.

They were all wrong. It was wonderful.

The film is based off the 2003 book of the same name about a mother’s struggle to raise her violent son. Eva, played by Tilda Swinton, whose performance should be a lesson to us all in the power of minimalist acting, has problems with her baby boy Kevin from the beginning. He cries constantly, and only stops his tears when daddy Franklin (John C. Reilly) comes home from work. As Swinton described in the Q&A after the screening, “From the start they don’t like each other” and the mother-son rivalry ensues. As a toddler, Kevin still can’t say “mommy” or roll a ball back and forth in a friendly game. Eva takes him to a doctor who concludes, “There’s nothing wrong with him.” Franklin firmly agrees, and Eva is alone in her suspicion that Kevin is seriously troubled. As he grows older, his mischief only gets worse, refusing to potty train, or show any respect or love towards Eva, which makes it harder for her to contain her frustration. At one point, Kevin is so menacing that Eva hurts him physically…on accident. The film follows Kevin through his teens until he commits his most violent act yet. 

It isn’t surprising that the film was both written and directed by Lynne Ramsey. If a director picked up this script, they probably wouldn’t be able to make sense of it if it hadn’t been of their own creation. It’s constantly jumping back and forth, sideways and in and out. Eva is first seen living alone, in a house drenched in red paint. Why? We still don’t know, but we can imagine it has to do with Kevin. Her situation is slowly revealed with flashbacks of her first days of romance with Franklin, images of a little girl with an eye-patch and a high-school parking lot packed with crying faces and police cars. The tone is foreboding, and we know this story must end badly. What keeps us transfixed is how it all happened. The choppy storyline and at times nauseating cinematography puts us in the mind of Eva; how a mother must feel after the crime her son commits…

No one can ignore the applause greatly deserved by casting director Billy Hopkins. He put together a magnificent ensemble. The three little boys who play Kevin are beyond adorable, you want to hug them to death, but sometimes you think…literally. They’re at one moment precious and the other preposterous. Ezra Miller, who plays Kevin in his teen years, gives a performance guaranteed to launch a young star’s career. When Miller and Swinton stand next to each other, it’s chilling, both with such sharp, beautiful features and creamy white skin, they truly do look like mother and son. Miller begins to make sense of Kevin’s hate towards his mother, he sees right through her. She never loved him. Or did she?

The film definitely poses more questions than answers. You squirm in your seat with discomfort and frustration throughout the entire film. Are Kevin’s tendencies a result of his mother’s behavior or are they innate and unavoidable? Why doesn’t Franklin listen to Eva when she tells him that Kevin has serious troubles? How do you deal with children in general?

Anyone who writes off the film as a failure is probably just lazy. Ramsey makes you work to find answers and has chosen to make a film that doesn’t feel pressured to conclude things with a big red bow…maybe just a bow and arrow.