We Need to Talk About Kevin
Ramsay's nature/nurture drama a gawky bloodbath.
DIRECTED BY LYNNE RAMSAY
We Need to Talk About Kevin can bop about freely between periods in the life of Kevin (Ezra Miller, for the most part) and his mother Eva (Tilda Swinton) and not risk losing its audience, for the simple reason that we already know what happens. The ending—in which a teenage Kevin shoots up his high school—is the premise. What we’re supposed to invest ourselves in is a quieter drama of revelation, in understanding how exactly Kevin got to this point, and what role his chillingly distant relationship with Eva played. But setting up the nature/nurture debate seems futile when Kevin is characterized as a demonspawn on par with Damien. Even as a toddler, Kevin seems just plain evil, taking pleasure in playing his fretful “mommer” against his oblivious dad (John C. Reilly).
Ramsay seems to be daring us to identify with Kevin, through her antisocial, almost sociopathic lensing of Middle America as a land of dopey, callous morons. (A scene at an office Christmas party drips with near-Trierean levels of nastiness.) This counterposes the film to something like Van Sant’s Elephant, which shares Kevin‘s subject matter, but not its manically stylized sneering. Kevin finesses the whole “the only answer is that there are no answers” angle, which of course proves the easiest answer of all, as if the whole drama is some misty emotional and motivational conspiracy. Granted, Ramsay’s compositions are frequently masterful, and Swinton does her deer-in-headlights thing very well. But the film’s attempts to elevate airport novel pulp fodder, however valiant, are overcooked and hysterical.