Search found 1 match: Tilda Swinton

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by AFlickering
Fri Dec 28, 2012 7:31 am
Forum: Full Reviews
Topic: we need to talk about kevin (lynne ramsay)
Replies: 0
Views: 1153

we need to talk about kevin (lynne ramsay)

there's a scene at the end of lynne ramsay's we need to talk about kevin when a defeated eva asks her incarcerated son kevin why he did a terrible thing, and he says "there was a time when i thought i knew"; a sensationalist exchange that just screams "THIS POOR BROKEN FAMILY UNIT, WHERE DID IT ALL GO SO WRONG?!", and which epitomises the disappointing pseudo-explicatory nature of the finale. if the point is to ruminate on the causes behind psychopathy in children, to treat kevin as a three-dimensional character with complex motives to unlock, the film is a failure. i'm sure the reasons behind kevin's act were a titillating mystery for the oh-so-shocked (i'm baffled by the amount of critics who didn't guess what was coming, it's surely foreshadowed every step of the way) audience to natter about on the way out of the theater, but it's a secondary issue left unanswered for the film's runtime, and as many critics have noted, it's rendered ridiculous by kevin's cartoonish characterisation. it's a conclusion which justifies accusations of indulgent, emptily provocative filmmaking.

fortunately, much of the film succeeds as an accusatory and slyly self-deprecating film about motherhood--the loneliness of it, the mirror's thickness between your child's flaws and your own, the way patriarchy makes it all ten times harder (john c. reilly's meek, disconnected husband defends kevin's torturing of his mother with "he's just a boy: that's what boys do")--and a rumination on the parallels between cinema and memory, the ways in which our perceptions of the present are irrepairably stained by both. it's a phenomenological account of a woman processing an unfathomable tragedy and her part in what led up to it; a suffocatingly quiet, lonely, almost zombielike present day, wherein eva (tilda swinton, best i've seen her since julia) scrubs her red paint-vandalised, ramshackle little house as though she were scrubbing her soul, juxtaposed against surreal, blood-red memories focusing on the nerve-rending rearing of the titular Unwanted Child From Hell (jasper newell, ezra miller). think the omen meets rosemary's baby meets, uh, robin hood - kevin is hardly a realistic creation, nor are some of the bitterly ironic visual gags, kitschy horror imagery and blatant movie references - but ramsay *mostly* doesn't ask that we believe otherwise, only that we believe eva believes. and boy oh boy did i believe; ramsay's haunted, disoriented aesthetic inhabits eva to the bone, her every shot jittery with nerves and suffocated by impending doom, as though witnessed through swinton's raw, sunken eyes.

it's a vision made no less convincing by its pop culture allusions; rather, they just make those moments when it slips into something mundanely familiar (such as a drained eva shouting at kevin to stop crying as they're walking around town) all the queasier. by extension, ramsay asks us to consider whether creating cinematic narratives is often, particularly after a cataclysmic event, the only way left to cope with and contextualise our darkest memories and darker fears; the execution of kevin's act is itself inspired by a book eva reads to him, performed with the larger-than-life, disdainful grandeur of a homeric god. it's the kind of film that makes you feel guilty for being a self-absorbed moviegoer hiding from your life in the comfort of a screen; it asks whether, as parents, loving and protecting our children requires a destruction of these shields we erect around ourselves, accepting our weaknesses lest those children become our fears made flesh. i wonder if this film is lynne ramsay's substitute child in that way; a manifestation of her fear of facing the sacrifices and responsibilities of mothering a little sprout of her own, a confrontation and exorcism of her own inner kevin. if so, perhaps the final act constitutes a backpedalling rationalisation worthy of eva herself.