Parent Trap

Not pleased to meet you in We Need to Talk About Kevin.

* * *  We Need to Talk About Kevin.  Written by Lynne Ramsay & Rory Kinnear, based on a novel by Lionel Shriver. Directed by Lynne Ramsay.

According to recent figures, 20% of American women don’t even start planning their pregnancies until after the age of 35. Instances of male infertility are likewise up because more potential fathers are putting off the big plunge. The delay is usually blamed on the demands of career or education. But all that seems more like a symptom than a cause, the consequence of a larger shift in priorities toward personal fulfillment—the notion that one needs to perfect oneself before venturing to procreate. At its crudest, it’s wrapped up in anxieties about the expense and bother of parenthood, because once you have a kid your life is basically over, right?

            Whatever its other virtues and weaknesses, Lynne Ramsay’s domestic horror We Need to Talk About Kevin trades skillfully in these anxieties. It’s the story of Eva (Tilda Swinton), a woman we first meet in a maelstrom of guilt and despair after some undisclosed tragedy. Through deftly arranged flashbacks, the script by Ramsay and Rory Kinnear fills out the story of Eva’s relationship with Kevin (played as a teen by Ezra Miller), the son who seems to have taken root in Eva’s womb with the sole purpose making a hell of her life.  As an infant Kevin is so colicky Eva seeks out jack-hammers to drown out his crying; in toddler-hood he’s so unresponsive she fears he’s autistic—until he opts to respond only with spite and viciousness. Dad (John C. Reilly) doesn’t get it, of course, because Kevin is a perfect angel around him. As the terrible twos give way to even more terrible ‘tweens and teens, Kevin’s machinations against his poor Mum become ever more sadistic, culminating in a final act of senseless violence that leaves Eva alone and reviled by everyone around her.

            No doubt, Kevin is chilling. Ramsay (Morvern Callar), a British director adapting an American novel with a British actress playing an American mother, builds to a steady crescendo of dread with her camera often no more than a foot or two  (and sometimes a few inches) from the face of pure evil. Much like Adrian Lyne in Fatal Attraction a generation ago,  she tells what is by nature an implausible story—a worst case scenario in the course of human events—with such skill that its remoteness from actual human behavior is never an issue. Or hardly ever, except when Ramsay indulges a few sledgehammer visual metaphors, such as the blood-red paint splashed on Eva’s front door she struggles to strip off (“Out, out, damn’d spot!”).

            Ramsay’s most consequential choice lay in casting the cool, humorless Swinton in a role that could have gone in nearly an infinity of directions. Alternatives like Ashley Judd or Vera Farmiga, for instance, would have been similarly intelligent, authentically American, and more obviously sympathetic. But Ramsay doesn’t want Eva to be automatically sympathetic. Kevin, after all, is a reflection of her, of her dread at the prospect of compromising her life. As Ramsay clearly shows, she is dejected by Kevin’s arrival virtually as soon as she leaves the delivery room, long before he can do much more than burble and suck.  Swinton is not so much a mother here as the Thin White Duke, a figure so otherworldly and androgynous as to be beyond the need for mere mortal reproduction. And indeed, it’s one of Kevin’s ironic pleasures that Miller plays Kevin with more feminine silkiness, more bewitching bitchiness than Swinton ever could if their roles were reversed.

            There were many times in this film when I wanted to yell at the screen, to tell Eva to show some wit, some trace of creativity in dealing with Kevin and his deliberately soiled underpants. To adapt a phrase, it takes a heart of stone not to laugh at a child’s self-defeating spite. But of course I was missing the point: Eva is a modern martyr on the cross of procreation, and it isn’t in the nature of a martyr to relieve her burden with clever tricks. Her part is only to suffer.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro