Not a Labor Party manifesto, rather WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (M) is an exquisitely realised adaptation of the novel by Lionel Shriver.
A captivating, creative, compelling and mesmerizing movie, Lynne Ramsay is totally on track to being the second female director to bring home Oscar bacon.
Her study of a serial killer through the mass murderer’s mother’s perceptions, feelings, and misgivings gives new meaning to the term ‘misconception’.
Movies with demonic children are usually of the horror genre, spawn of Satan sublimating and distancing progeny and parent, a kind of anti Immaculate Conception, born with original sin, malice aforethought, the mark of Cain, and sign of the beast. The Kevin of the title makes THE OMEN’S fallen angel Damien look like a cherub and without all the mumbo jumbo Bible babble superstitious six-six-six silliness.
Almost from conception, Kevin conveys a certain unease within his mother, and certainly from birth, his bearing borders on the unbearable. The beastly baby evolves into a terror toddler and onto a terrorising teenager.
Tilda Swinton takes a tilt and a swipe for another Oscar as the fragile mum whose observational intuition regarding her son grate against the template of maternal instinct. By contrast, her maternal instincts seem to be firing on all cylinders in regard to her second born daughter.
Is it a gender thing? Her male partner ups the ante of antagonism with his suspicion that the disconnect between mother and son is all her fault. His boys- will- be -boys edict consolidates the disconnect to include husband and wife. His lack of support for her is noted by the son who in turn manipulates the father to further his suspicion that she is persecuting the boy by some post-natal notion of alienation. A male doctor she consults is similarly patronising. She appears to be totally devoid of female support.
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN is a provocative portrait of parenthood, an enthralling evocation of the nurture vs. nature idea, and bravely eschews the dysfunctional family cliché by presenting them instead as unsynchronised. The gear box of the family unit crashes and gnashes. When mum wants to clutch, dad decides to break. When mum wants to park, dad wants to reverse.
John C. Reilly plays the dad as a bit of a Pollyanna, a facsimile of a FATHER KNOWS BEST fifties sit com dad blind to the reality that his domestic situation resembles more of a David Lynch environment than a hearty hearth and home scenario.
Three actors are employed as Kevin – toddler Rocky Duer, pre-teen Jasper Newell and teenager Ezra Miller. All convey the petulance and malevolence of a boy who cannot bond with his mother.
Unconventional in its narrative, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN boasts a bravura, visceral visual style and bold sound design. Red is its primary colour, viscous, sticky red, realised in paint or pulped tomatoes, symbolic of anger, rage and blood. Sounds morph from the mundane to the menacing creating a cacophony of confusion. This is engaging and exciting cinema.
© Richard Cotter
16th November, 2011
Tags: Sydney Movie Of The Week, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, Lynne Ramsay, Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Rocky Duer, Jasper Newell, Ezra Miller.