We Need to Talk About Kevin (3/5 Stars)

What fresh hell is this?

It is hard to talk about “We Need to Talk about Kevin,” because it is not really a movie about something. It has a fragmented structure that jumps freely around a pivotal event at a local high school in which a teenager named Kevin takes his favorite bow and arrow and lets loose quite a few notches into his fellow classmates. We see Kevin as a little child showing many warning signs of his coming infamy. And we see him in jail afterwards but only when visited by family. And we never really see the massacre as it is happening because the movie is not about Kevin. It is about his mother.

Kevin is seen entirely through his mother’s eyes, and in those eyes, he is and has been an evil bastard ever since the day he was born. He wouldn’t stop crying as a baby, he was defiantly opposed to potty training as a toddler, and was prone to sadistic pranks on his mother and little sister up until he finally murdered a bunch of people. This movie is absorbing and unsettling in its moments, but as a whole lacks an arc. There is plenty here that a student of film can learn about composing memorable shots or creating unspoken tension in a scene, but I can’t recommend the movie as a story. Enjoy it in the moment is all I can say.

Tilda Swinton plays Kevin’s mother, Eva, in a state of almost continual mental exhaustion. Several different actors at various states play Kevin, Ezra Miller most memorably as the teenager. It is anybody’s guess whom is to blame for Kevin’s sociopathic tendencies, but it is clear that Eva is more than ambivalent about being a mother, not that even she deserved a kid like Kevin. The kid seemed to hate her even before he should have known of her dislike.

As I said, this movie exists entirely in the moment, and there are some great ones here. There is a nice scene when baby Kevin won’t stop his infernal wailing and Eva actually pauses near a jackhammer on the street just so she can get some respite from the sound. Then there is this almost uncanny ability of the director, Lynne Ramsey, to make food look and sound really disgusting. Behold how Kevin makes a jelly sandwich or the consistency of the oatmeal poured into the sink. And I suggest waiting a day before eating scrambled eggs after seeing this movie. Finally Ramsey has composed some really nice shots that would look great as posters. Take the look of Tilda Swinton after she has given birth, or hiding in the supermarket, or staring at her vandalized home smeared in red paint. It is a memorable performance made pretty special by the way Swinton is framed and edited. Should Tilda have gotten an Oscar Nomination? Yes, I think she probably should have.

But as I said, the movie though unpredictable in chronological structure is predictable in the sense that the characters do not change. Kevin is always a little sociopath and the movie is just one scene after another in which he is inconsiderate and frighteningly hateful toward his mother. I do not know, perhaps some people are just like that without explanation. A pretty good question may be why Kevin did not kill his mother as well on that fateful day. Well, perhaps living the life she leads afterward, shunned by society and receiving little else but curses and dirty looks, is a fate even worse than death. Tilda sure seems to play it that way and Kevin seems smart enough to know it.