Mubi Monday: We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

The first time I watched We Need To Talk About Kevin I must say I wasn't that impressed. It felt like two hours spent in the company of generally unpleasant, or blinkered, characters. There was a shocking finale, an event that has reverberated throughout the entire film without viewers knowing exactly what it is until the third act, but nothing much that otherwise worked for me, although I couldn't fault it in terms of the acting and technical side of things.

It worked a lot more for me this time around. It's still a very difficult watch, deliberately so, but it's one that gives you plenty to think about and doesn't really try to offer any biased view of the main characters, which makes it even more difficult to figure out and discuss.

Based on the novel by Lionel Shriver, this is essentially a tale of nature vs nurture. Tilda Swinton plays Eva, a woman who eventually becomes a mother to Kevin (played by various actors, but it's Ezra Miller who makes the strongest impression in the teenage incarnation). Eva is married to Franklin (John C. Reilly) and it soon becomes clear that their new baby is all for daddy and not much for mummy. It's also clear that Eva isn't really feeling the strong maternal bond that is usually a given in movie depictions of motherhood. We see all of these things in flashback, because Eva leads a very different life in the here and now. She seems to be away from her family, her home and car are splattered with red paint by unknown vandals, and she is aggressively confronted/assaulted by people who pass her by in public. It's clear that something bad happened, but not clear what that is.

Director Lynne Ramsay hasn't made a bad movie. Although I used to think this was one of her lesser films, despite the praise it received, I now see it as being almost on a par with the other films I have seen from her. Ramsay has a way of perfectly balancing out film techniques and naturalism, always getting just the right cast and working in a way that suits the material. I can't ever bring myself to fully love this film, it's just the subject matter being so offputting to me in a way that causes me to feel revulsion during some scenes (and probably not the scenes that would cause others to feel revulsion), but I'm no longer going to play it down as something lesser than it really is.

Swinton is very good in her role, a mother who doesn't seem to take easily to mothering. But the beauty of the film, and the adaptation of the source material by Ramsay and Rory Stewart Kinnear, means that you're never 100% sure of that. Is she resenting her child and acting in a way that he can sense, or is the child acting so badly that his mother becomes more and more worn down by his behaviour? Reilly does well in his smaller role, giving a very typical portrayal of a parent who only sees the good in his children when he comes along in time for the better moments. He's not a bad father at all, he just doesn't ever happen to see any of the worst incidents. Although I have already mentioned Miller, who gives a performance here that may well remain a career-best for him for many years, I'll also praise Rock Duer and Jasper Newell, both playing Kevin in his younger years.

Complex, difficult, intriguing, We Need To Talk About Kevin is a film that sets out to ask questions it has no answers for. Because, perhaps most troublingly for many viewers, there often are no answers. Certainly no easy ones anyway. All we can do is manage our own behaviours, and try to do our best by those we love, and that is always going to be a more difficult, and more constant, option than finding easy answers.

8/10

You can buy the movie here.

A mother and her Kevins