WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN - The Full Review

Tilda Swinton is a “tour de force” as a mom whose son is scarier than any teens this writer has interviewed who had killed their parents or were death row inmates sentenced as juveniles.

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Lynne Ramsay’s new film is an adaption of novelist Lionel Shriver’s, We Need To Talk About Kevin. I didn’t read the book and forgot to ask for production notes, so I had to scour for book reviews and commentaries as I was wrestling with a diabolically annoying conundrum. In one review I found, “Shriver even quotes in the back of her book that the film adaptation is “well cast, beautifully shot and thematically loyal.”

Agreed. Yes, about the casting: Tilda Swinton, immaculately arresting, so much that it was easy to be drawn into the scenes upon scenes that were waves of wonderment and dazzling images — and lose touch with the reality that I was there to be in the moment to write a review. John C. Reilly, a superb actor, really isn’t at fault for being reduced to a vapor of a presence but because he was there, the anticipation that he would bloom added to the movie moment (though he didn’t). And Kevin Miller, yes, a first-rate, despicably evil adolescent. And, yes, cinematography, deft, imaginative, sweeping this reviewer up into a big screen, adding to the experience of a rift in the space-time continuum causing, again, a lost with reality. And, even, yes, to being “thematically loyal” to the book even though I did not read the book and probably won’t though I will not question Shriver’s positive affirmation of an adaption of her own work though I wonder if she was misquoted. Why? I can’t imagine a diabolically annoying conundrum in her book.

To understand the Why-s raised in the movie, one must read the book?

Plot: An happily married travel journalist (or maybe an affluent travel journalist happily coupled monogamously) — working class females never in a movie like this — gives birth to a son whom the audience knows could have been sired by Satan (but wasn’t) and early in the film this is not so obvious, so, the toddler could be autistic or flawed in some manner by an irascible Nature (or demon if this was a supernatural story which it isn’t.

But it’s safe to say scenes of his toddling to his toilet training, albeit the latter delayed, the son is preternaturally annoying, disrupting mom’s inner harmony. As adolescence approaches, he becomes more sadistically cunning and vicious and, of course, masterfully manipulative, his animus directed to the core of mom’s soul: He wants her to suffer, I mean really, really suffer. He pretty much ignores dad. Why? Why? Why? And she puts up with it all without coming across as a marshmallow or a suburban wimp.

The scenes of this demonic transfigurative transformation through the years are prescient, some laced with amusement, though this isn’t a Rosemary’s Baby.

Nor is an (or one of the) Omen(s) and that’s unfortunate because the supernatural can be good for resolving potentially diabolically irritating conundrums when the illogical or an oversight threatens to sabotage a creative work. I’m not giving anything away: Son kills and slays and slaughters and there were warning signs all along the way. I can say I’m not giving anything away because Director Ramsay and writer Rory Kinnear, struggling (I imagine) to get a grip on the diabolically irritating conundrum of Why Why Why, resorted to deft movie making techniques with flash forwards and flash backs and creative uses of color and flourishes of the surreal and the unreal and other methods, creative ones that I won’t give away here.

Those telling techniques plus Swinton’s bravura performance will cause many in the audience to see this moving more than once, at least twice, to get at the diabolically irritating conundrum of Why Why Why without resorting to the book.

Gregg Morris can be reached at gmorris@hunter.cuny.edu